This conception of the role of the humanities and arts in the NII is the latest example of what Eco in "Travels in Hyperreality" refers to as the Last Beach ideology, a recurrent historical belief that we are living in decadent times witness to the fall of a major civilization. It thus becomes the responsibility of the new civilization to collect as many fragments of the old civilization as possible and to recreate them in ever more elaborate forms of simulacra (wax museums, in Eco's examples) for universal consumption. In Eco's example:
It is the ideology of preservation, in the New World, of the treasures that the folly and negligence of the Old World are causing to disappear into the void. Naturally this ideology conceals something. . . in the case of Getty, the fact that it is the entrepreneurial colonization by the New World (of which J. Paul Getty's oil empire is a part) that makes the Old World's condition critical. Just like the crocodile tears of the Roman patrician who reproduced the grandeurs of the very Greece that his country had humiliated and reduced to a colony. And so the Last Beach ideology develops a thirst for preservation of art from imperialistic efficiency, but at the same time it is the bad conscience of this imperialistic efficiency, just as cultural anthropology is the bad conscience of the white man who thus pays his debt to the destroyed primitive cultures (38-9)Eco identifies the Getty as one of the less kitsch and more subtle practitioners of Last Beach preservation and it is no accident then that we should find the Getty involved in advocating the importance of "national data sets." But this latest version of the Last Beach ideology has an interesting wrinkle. For now the older civilization that is facing collapse is considered to be the US itself, manifested in the number of perceived losses that I have outlined above. Hence the report's evocation of the virtual as a realm of digitized timelessness in which the treasures of US culture (as well as all those that it has begged, borrowed, and stolen from others) can be safely stowed.
Hence also the interest in the humanities as a creator of objects rather than of mechanisms of interpretation. For the most threatening form of loss is that of consensus concerning the meaning and value of not only the works in the national data set but also the meaning and value of the US culture of which they are a part. The conception of humanities and art institutions as producers of interpretative functions would thus threaten to introduce a dangerous relativism into the idea of a national data set. Such alternative interpretations of the database might, for example, argue that the same technology that Humanities and Arts on the Information Highways and the Task Force reports believe will "save" us from the present "crisis" is also implicated in having created the society of which we are presently a part. xxxvi
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There have beensince 01 April 97
