The Invention of Air: Eureka Interruptus

By Harvey Blume

“The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America,” Riverhead Books. $25.95.

Steven Johnson’s new book is as dull and dispiriting as much of his previous work has been eye-opening and exhilarating. In the past, even if Johnson’s conclusions were questionable — as with the high praise he doled out to video games and television shows in “Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter” (2005) — there was plenty to savor in the freshness of his argument.

Johnson has the gift of sharing with readers the excitement he feels as he rethinks culture and media. In the new book, though, it feels as if something has curdled or stalled. Instead of the crisp prose and abundance of insights that have marked his work, there is repetition and lecturing. Johnson seems to have slipped into the role of a professor, concerned to drive the lesson home and make sure the students in his packed lecture hall not fail to remember it.

The lesson at hand is connectedness. “The Invention of Air,” holds forth, first of all, on, connectedness among men, most notably Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley who, in the 1760s were part of a group of London intellectuals known as the Honest Whigs. Secondly, there is connectedness among disciplines: The Honest Whigs were England’s cutting edge with regard not only to scientific thought but also political and theological debate. Finally, Johnson lands heavily and repetitively on geological/ecological/historical connectedness: We are informed often enough that the coal fueling England’s industrial revolution in the days of the Honest Whigs derived from the plant life that had countless millennia before endowed earth with its oxygen rich atmosphere.

Oxygen is at the purported center of the book; it is the air alluded to in the book’s title, and Joseph Priestley the coffee drinking, free-thinking polymath empiricist who discovered it. But if you don’t happen to recall Priestley’s role as (actually, a co-) discoverer of oxygen, you wait very long for Johnson to fill you in, wondering what exactly Priestley did that Johnson should think to wrap so many laurels of connectedness around him.


Steven Johnson shows “a disrespect for narrative” in his latest book.

Johnson came of age intellectually with “Interface Culture” (1997), in which, taking off from Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin, he asked probing questions about the fate of storytelling in the age of computer media. He proposed that the computer interface would become as crucial a medium to the twenty-first century as the novel had been to the Victorian age, but without necessarily serving similar narrative purposes. In his new book, Johnson seems to have resolved his quandary about narrative by finding it wanting. His rendition of Priestley’s discovery of oxygen deprives it of suspense. Johnson prefers many sidebars on connectedness to eureka moments. The book is full of Eureka interruptus.

There’s a circularity to Johnson’s approach: In order to fully appreciate any particular element of his tale — oxygen, science, 18th century England, industrialization —you must first assimilate several complete pictures. Since the characters, confined to their own time, with their own science, could not see all that, there’s is a lot of foreshadowing, backpedaling and long zooming. Johnson seems not to know that good scientific and historical writing cuts through circularity by respecting the story at its core and introducing as much context as the tale calls for and can sustain. Disrespect for narrative makes “The Invention of Air”, well, gassy.

In “Interface Culture”, perhaps the best of many reflections on media that were inspired by the Internet explosion, Johnson wrote that, “the sheer velocity with which technology now advances” put us in a privileged position to see how “our habits of thought” were tied to the “progression, the change from one form to another.”

The basic problem with “The Invention of Air” may be that this observation is somewhat dated. When rapid change in media is as constant as it is now, it ceases to be quite so revelatory; it is a given. Interpreting the Honest Whigs in terms of the headiest possibilities suggested by new media and the computer revolution has the air of dogma rather than discovery.

==========================================================================================

My review of Johnson’s second book, “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software”, is here.

My blog on chess can be found here.

5 Comments

  1. Robert Bison, Professor on February 1, 2009 at 5:51 pm

    Your comments about lecturing versus narrative or story-telling are provocative, especially in light of the subject matter of Johnson’s previous work, which you summarize as follows.

    Johnson came of age intellectually with “Interface Culture” (1997), in which, taking off from Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin, he asked probing questions about the fate of storytelling in the age of computer media.

    Could you explain exactly what you mean by “disrespect for narrative”?

    Bob

    P.S. “Johnson seems to have slipped into the role of a professor, concerned to drive the lesson home and make sure the students in his packed lecture hall not fail to remember it.”

    The comma implies all professors so structure their lectures. Not true, though we do struggle with narratives. And storytelling, for practical purposes, may not be a priority.

  2. Harvey Blume on February 1, 2009 at 7:34 pm

    Robert,

    Hi.

    Thanks for your comment.

    Re narrative, let me let Johnson speak a little more fully for himself, as he did in “Interface Culture”:

    Where the novel ushered its readers through the crowds and assembly-lines of industrial life, the meta-forms process and contextualize the byzantine new reality of information overload. They serve as buffers, translators, tour guides. Unlike the novel, they prefer evaluation and interpretation to storytelling and character development.

    Now let me backtrack a bit: For me, and I think for Johnson, one touchstone for this discussion is Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nilolai Leskov.” In it Benjamin writes:

    If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs.

    For Benjamin, information was the antithesis to narrative (as Benjamin *did not* think cinema was the antithesis of art).

    I think Johnson has had this antithesis in mind throughout his work. For him, the graphic user interface, the Internet, and video games are a sort of third term — they are new forms that take the discussion beyond old polarities.

    I have always found Johnson’s arguments along these lines to be exciting and original.

    Still, “The Invention Of Air” is not a graphic user interface, not a video game, and not, of course, the world wide web. It might have worked better had it been, say, a video game. It seems uncomfortable and is unsatisfying as a book. It consists, really, of a series of hyperlinks. If it has a theme, that theme is more hyperlinkage itself than it is the life and work of Joseph Priestley. Priestley seems more a pretext for the book than its subject.

    As to my claiming that Johnson had slipped “into the role of a professor,” what I meant was just that “The Invention Of Air” felt less like an act of discovery than like a didactic exercise, a rehash. That’s not meant to disparage being a professor, and I’m sorry if it could be read in that vein. I meant to ask where Steven Johnson goes now.

    Harvey

  3. Robert Bison, Professor on February 3, 2009 at 11:11 pm

    For Benjamin, information was the antithesis to narrative

    This is reminiscent of Walker Percy’s essay Loss of Creature, in which he describes his horror at the dissection of a lungfish (as I recall). Something, in the taking apart of a creature, is lost. The something, I suppose is experience (of being a lungfish, perhaps, or marveling at one.)

    Arguably, the same is true of any such analysis. To analyze a wedding as a rite of passage is not likely to invoke any sentimental tears. Something is clearly experientially lost and were not analytically inclined, the result would be a rather boring lecture, I agree.

    Nevertheless, such an analysis is revealing. It is an altering of perspective. It allows for the comparison of weddings over time and space, or weddings versus graduations. It allows us to see resemblance (as we might see homology between a lungfish and a pig). It allows us to see, perhaps, elements of ritual in everyday life.

    I would not equate this with hyperlinking. On the contrary, good analysis stays very much on focus. Hyperlinking is reminiscent of so-called associative essays. My students are tormented with such essays in a composition book entitled Ways of Reading, in which authors typically move from a description of something exotic or of historical import to their personal life to, say, a bottle of shampoo. This was fashionable in the 80s and 90s, and it does allow for making interesting connections, but there is something empty about this type of text.

    I often wonder if hyperlinking is making us smarter or just more obnoxious.

  4. Harvey Blume on February 4, 2009 at 9:10 am

    robert,

    i think part of the issue has to do with how broadly we define narrative.

    is a euclidean proof a narrative?

    is a chess game a narrative?
    (i wd say unhesitatingly that it is. of course it is a narrative best told by chess moves. chess moves are its native code, so to speak. but it is a narrative that can also be conveyed by natural language.).

    the forces or factors involved in a narrative need not be human.

    benjamin himself, for all his worry about old-fashioned storytelling, generated high-order, high-level narratives — though steven johnson might argue that they are less narratives than they are cultural interfaces.

    as for percy, no a dead & dissected lungfish isn’t a lungfish, for sure, but neither is a fictional white whale a white whale.

    this is not to say everything is or shd be narrative.

    > i often wonder if hyperlinking is making us smarter or just more obnoxious.

    (the difference being? kidding. or maybe more adhd-ish.)

    but it’s likely that hyperlinking forces some expansion of our notion of narrative.

    & we’ve sd nothing of dreams, which pertain to narrative.

    harvey

  5. Harvey Blume on February 4, 2009 at 1:36 pm

    robert,

    thinking back on my reply to you earlier, i think i left something important out, namely, reason.

    reason is not the opposite of narrative, but simply, if you will, its “other.”

    i think the first time reason showed itself in human history independently of religion was among the greeks.

    it was not, for them, the handmaiden of theology nor, necessarily, of narrative.

    it had — and of course still has — its own place.

    harvey

Leave a Comment





Recent Posts