Alan Liu

In 1983, he lined the walls of a room with floor-to-ceiling panels of cardboard on which he carefully inscribed the events of William Wordsworth’s life and times until he was encircled by an intricate, seething web of dates threaded with colored strings pinned from node to node. Sometimes when he stood back, he could almost make out the whole pattern there. Something immanent–not the portrait of an author or his age, perhaps, yet more than just a pulsing circuitry of convergences and divergences–seemed to bulge across the interface into the room. But it always retreated. There was too much imprecision, white space, noise in the panels–too much that could not be known or inscribed except through imprecision, white space, noise.

In 1989, he wrote an essay on the fascination of postmodern cultural criticism with “local knowledge,” “the massive fact of cultural and historical particularity,” “the concrete, the material, and the particular,” “the details of disposition and empirical contingency,” the “picture of great detail,” “etc.” “Media-oriented readers,” he wrote, “may wish to view this matrix [of detail] as if with remote control in hand–flitting from channel to channel and sentence fragment to fragment in a hallucinatory blur of strangely continuous discontinuity.” Perhaps detailism, he thought, could be immersion in history. But in the end, he found himself again writing about the retreat of the presence. Immanence became detachment. The pictures of great detail dissolved into simulations whose hyper-resolution was somehow the same as background noise, a mere texture or decor of history.

Then in the 1990s, he thought he had found the medium of capable imagination for these slippery encounters with history: not cardboard or TV channel, but network and database. Some years after collaborating to build the Romantic Chronology on the Web, he rebuilt the site in a database that dynamically generated lists of events, each flanked by a “Details” link that convened related resources automatically. As in the case of other database-to-Web projects he experimented with at the time (culminating in the migration of his Voice of the Shuttle into a database), he felt that the Romantic Chronology might thus offer a fuller, livelier picture of great detail. Yet, the more he learned about the workings of databases, the more he woke to the fact that the great, digitally-sharp massifs of detail they rendered only set off by contrast all the presence not there–whatever could not be cut up and cut down to fit the granular structures of databases, whatever could thus appear only as a ghost within the ceaseless froth of redundant or contradictory entries, overlapping dates, null values, and other database noise attesting to the pressure of the unstructured and unknown. That part of history that was by nature blurred, messy, and contingent (contingent-em, Latin for “touching together or on all sides, lying near, contiguous, coming into contact or connexion, befalling, happening, coming to pass”; from con + tangere, con-touch) could not manifest in databases of fine, digital touch. Only some grosser, whole-body, ambient touch, he thought, could make contact with the ghost.