Leadership in an Internet World

So I just read a very interesting piece about Barak Obama as the "Wiki-candidate"in the New York Times and the essay got me to thinking about the tension between leadership and collaboration. "Collaboration," of course, comes straight from the element "labor," and, and thus, means "to work together." The OED provides a citation from 1860 as the first printed instance of the word; I can't help but notice that date as significant.

Charles Reade, in whose Eighth Commandment, the word appears, as an adaptation of the French "collaborateur," shared clear sympathies with trade unionists and the language of the trade union permeates his work. The Eighth Commandment, begins with a description of "literary commerce," which is like all other "trades and transactions." So although the French "collaborateur" has early on a literary sense (the OED cites 1801 as the first instance of the word as a non-nativized form meaning "One who works in conjunction with another or others; esp. in literary, artistic, or scientific work."), I can't help but think that the other connotations of labor circulating in the 19th century wouldn't have colored Reade's usage as well.

In the quasi-allegorical section in which "collaboration" appears, the "collaborateur" is alternately described as a "literary accomplice," an "associated calligrapher," and a "copyist." In effect, the allegory suggests the exploitation of the "co-writer" for the gain of the bigger name and plays with the notion of the "literary source." Nevertheless, Reade suggests that the collaborateur, under the copyright treaties of the period, comes out on the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

So I find the now positive sense of "collaboration," especially in the sense of web-based collaboration (witness Wikipedia, etc.) quite interesting. No matter how many people collaborate on a single project, glory (and blame) is difficult to distribute, and inevitably goes to the leader. A collaborator, in the literary sense, remains the secondary entity--the second name in the list, the person forgotten. A quick survey of great collaborators will serve: the economic philosophy is not "MarxandEngelism" but Marxism. No one remembers Pierre Curie, only his wife, who hasn't even retained her first name. Few have heard of Roy Mottelson, but many would recognize the name Niels Bohr.

What, therefore, does the collaborator risk? Must a collaborator be comfortable with anonymity? What is the reward for collaboration? And which leader should be applauded? The leader who values collaboration or the leader who shuns it? All that said, I believe that a leader who values collaboration, encourages it, and spurs it, is much better for any community, because there is less likelihood of tyranny; but I fear that a leader who honors collaboration might be perceived, come election-time as deficient compared to a more autocratic personality. Perhaps the key to success for Democrats will consist in a change in our understanding of collaboration. The collaborator musn't be the uncredited ghost-writer, or the power behind the throne, but the workman set to a task in service of an overwhelmingly clear vision.

Popular and popularity...

Two factors intersected to produce today's post. 1) The seven-year old came home with one of those "nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I might as well eat dirt" attitudes, because she wasn't picked to distribute cupcakes; and 2) We're reading C. S. Lewis's Preface to Paradise Lost in my summer course. Lewis distinguishes between popular and court poetry. For him, popular is truly "of the people," rather than "beloved of the people."

For the seven-year old, the definition appears to be "recognized as worthy irrespective of one's attitude toward the people." I would hazard a guess that this definition arises from the characterization of adolescents on tv, where the "popular" tend to be both admired and despised without evidence of any inherent worthiness.

Contemplating the Canon

My department has been talking a great deal about the "Canon" (big 'c' and one 'n'--so not the kind that goes "boom, boom"), while at the same time I've been reviewing C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image. I've often toyed with the idea of requiring students to read DI before they begin reading early British literature, because Lewis explains the rhetorical and cultural foundations that underlie much of British lit--he explains the Ptolemaic universe, the neo-Platonic personifications that we find sprinkled through Renaissance literature, and foregrounds the role that world-view plays in the construction of art.

But Lewis also uses the term "canon" slightly differently.

We have therefore had to supplement the canon of saving the phenomena by another canon--first, perhaps, formulated with full clarity by Occam. According to this second canon we must accept (provisionally) not any theory which saves the phenomena but that theory which does so with the fewest possible assumptions. (15)

Lewis uses "canon" in the sense that derives from its ecclesiastical and legal sense; the OED defines "canon" as "A general rule, fundamental principle, aphorism, or axiom governing the systematic or scientific treatment of a subject." Yet this meaning also extends into the literary realm and, thus, become "canons of criticism, taste, art."

So all this has got me wondering about the "literary canon." When we speak of the literary canon, "The body of literary works traditionally regarded as most important," can we really now think in terms of a "body," a physically constrained set of texts, with a physical terminus? If we think of a literary canon as a physical entity, a body, it must be a corpse, not a living thing. We should note the tense and mood of each of the verbs in the OED's citations:

1929 Amer. Lit. 1 95 Those who read bits of Mather with pleasure will continue to feel that those bits cannot be excluded from the canon of literature until much excellent English ‘utilitarian’ prose is similarly excluded.

1953 W. R. TRASK tr. E. R. Curtius European Lit. & Lat. Middle Ages xiv. 264 Of the modern literatures, the Italian was the first to develop a canon. 1989 Times Lit. Suppl. 7 July 739 My Secret History..alludes to half the modernist canon, from Eliot to Hemingway to Henry Miller. 1999 N.Y. Rev. Bks. 4 Nov. 29/2 The canon was under attack from feminists and social historians who saw it as the preserve of male and bourgeois dominance.

The canon, the body of literature, is acted upon in each of these citations--it's the result of assemblage; it's the development of a national "Genius"; it's a source for allusion; or it's a refuge under siege.

Would we better off to think of the word "canon," for literary purposes, as a set of rules for interpretation rather than a body of texts? If we have "canons for interpretation," we can apply those rules wherever we please and our technique becomes more important than the object upon which we act. Perhaps my concerns are merely semantic--but what is literature without words/