The Arts of Contingency

Our age is preoccupied with questions about the ways of creating, transmitting, and appropriating knowledge. "The arts of transmission" as Francis Bacon called them, are those essential practices through which ideas are articulated, distributed, and passed on to our successors. As we try to understand the most important changes in our culture - whether in the crisis of education, the fluctuating fortunes of the information economy, or the ambivalent exhilaration of the digital revolution - we find ourselves returning to these practices. Bacon's "arts" are as urgent a concern now as at any moment since the advent of printing.