Excerpt from On the Limits of Descriptive Writing, Apropos of Lessing's Laocoon Many of the objections that this monograph urges against the theories of the Laocoon first occurred to me in the spring of 1901 while I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. It was not until the next year, however, while a fellow in English at Yale, that the ideas were put into written form. They were at that time embodied in a paper read before the Yale English Club. Since then I have given considerable attention to the subject, have enlarged the scope of the inquiry, and have collected much new material. In spite of my apparently hostile attitude to the Laocoon in the beginning of the paper, the ultimate purpose of my work has been much the same as Lessing's. It is an attempt to get past the mere externals of criticism to the fundamental principle, and by means of this principle to discover the aesthetic and linguistic limitations of descriptive literature. In carrying out this programme I hope that everywhere I have used scientific caution. Though some of the theories advanced are new, I have tried to base them on adequate psychological foundations. If I have made mistakes I shall be glad to rectify them. I take pleasure in thanking all who have assisted me in preparing this monograph. My greatest obligation is to Professor Scott, who not only first interested me in the study of rhetorical problems, but who has ever since kept alive this interest with frequent encouragement, and who now, in editing this work, has done me the great service of pruning it of much extraneous material. I also wish to thank Professors Pillsbury, Rebec, and Hempl of the University of Michigan, Professor Cook of Yale, and the members of the English department in the University of Kansas. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Regimes of Description responds to the perception—however imprecise—that forms of knowledge in every sector of contemporary culture are being fundamentally reshaped by the digital revolution: music, speech, engineering diagrams, weather reports, works of visual art, even the words most of us write are now subject, as Lyotard points out in The Inhuman, to a logic of the bit, the elemental unit of electronic information. It is now possible to slice, graft, and splice this knowledge in ways never before imagined using technologies that treat vast bodies of information as a stream of data bits. Programs and technical algorithms specify the criteria for discriminating between the data stream of a Mozart string quartet and the CAT scan of a diseased organ. But are these machine instructions and design parameters descriptions, or merely mechanical filters? And if the latter, what constitutes a description of digitally encoded knowledge? As a group, the essays in this volume pose that question as a first attempt to write the archaeology of the nature and history of description in the digital age.