Introduction: acceleration from the Industrial Revolution to the high modernity of our digital culture

Strether is a spectator. As such, he is a theoretical person: according to its Greek etymology, theory is a form of spectatorship. Perception, however, does not exclude praxis. On the contrary, James's writing and thought contaminates the practical with the theoretical. Rather than preventing an active life, Strether's theoretical bent slows down his actions and in doing so renders them more thoughtful. James's back and forth between perception and action, between meaning and deed has a special pertinence for our contemporary digital culture, which accentuates the blurring of the difference between audience and production. As George Dyson has recently argued, Von Neumann invented digital software when he and Turing instigated numbers not only to mean but to do things:

Once the computer was invented in the 1940s, ‘numbers would assume a life of their own: numerical organisms were replicated, nourished, and rewarded according to their ability to go out and do things: they performed arithmetic, processed words, designed nuclear weapons, and accounted for money in all its forms’ (Dyson 2012: 239). Our digital culture places a premium on actions, on doing. Actions are, however, more quickly and more efficiently performed by machines than by humans.

Questions of hermeneutics increasingly give way to the startling performance of computer-generated efficiency. Computers read faster than a human could ever read. As Dyson has pointed out, however, ‘reading does not imply understanding’ (Dyson 2012: 313). Speed does not necessarily coincide with intelligence. Infinite streams of information do not ensure that what is transmitted can also be understood: