Introduction

Alfred Schutz's life-world theory aims at working out the a priori, that is, historically and culturally universal, features of social reality (see Eberle 2009, 493). As he suggests in a 1940 paper, the eidetic insights provided by his constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude are valid for describing sociocultural worlds as different as that of a “sixty-year old Chinese Buddhist in the time of the Ming dynasty” and that of a “twenty-year old American Christian” of the twentieth century (Schutz 1964, 72). However, and this is the starting point of my reflections in this chapter, a large number of the examples he uses to illustrate his aprioristic theory are taken from Western modern societies.

The ordinary actors he describes are very often citizens of nation-states (Schutz 1964, 255–56), work as salespersons (123), businesswomen (120–21) or laborers in big factories (Schutz 2016, 271) and use money (258) to consume industrial products such as shaving creams (Schutz 1964, 71). They live in cities (66), drive cars (120–21) and travel by means of public transportation like the subway (94) or the railroad (102). And besides making phone calls (71) and utilizing the postal service (Schutz 1962, 25–26), they are users of mass media such as radio, newspapers and cinema (Schutz 1964, 118).

As I shall show in this chapter, the predominantly modern character of Schutz's examples is far from being anecdotal. Rather, it testifies both to his interest in theorizing about modern societies and to the ability of his life-world analysis to account for their peculiarities. Based on this conviction, the thesis I want to defend here is that Schutzian phenomenology makes relevant contributions to a sociological theory of modernity. To be sure, these contributions are mostly implicit and rudimentary—or, to put it phenomenologically, they remain at the margin of Schutz's theoretical attention. For, as many of the most prominent Schutz scholars agree, the main and explicit aim of his work was always to provide a “philosophical foundation to the methodology of the social sciences” (Eberle 2009, 493; see Barber 2021; Embree 2021).

With very few exceptions (see Schlembach 2019; García 2008), Schutz's rudimental contributions to a theory of modern society have been systematically neglected in the secondary literature.

In “The Telling of the Tale,” a posthumously published essay, Jorge Luis Borges rejoiced that the desire for epic never dies, even if the ancient form may have become obsolete. “In a way, people are hungering and thirsting for epic. I feel that epic is one of the things that men need. Of all places (and this may come as an anticlimax, but the fact is there), it has been Hollywood that has furnished epic to the world.” It is a claim both simple and provocative, and my youthful moviegoing experiences can testify to its legitimacy if not its conclusiveness. I passed my teenaged years in an era of self-conscious cinematic grandeur. Many American moviemakers, anxious about the incursion of small screens in people's homes, advertised their products as “epic”—and that meant giant screens, ostentatious overtures, intermissions and a run-time in the neighborhood of four hours. Before I had read the Iliad, the Odyssey or Paradise Lost, I knew The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, El Cid, Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, 55 Days at Peking, How the West Was Won, The Fall of the Roman Empire, The Greatest Story Ever Told.

There was a broad range of subjects and time periods in these mid-twentieth-century movies; their historical fidelity and cultural discernment were often dubious; and artistically they ran the gamut from the masterful to the meretricious. (It was a joke among my peers that one of the films on my list should have been titled The Longest Story Ever Told.) American films since the beginning of the twentieth century had been linking visual spectacle with evocative music—a mix that is one of Wagner's legacies to cinema. And the composers who scored the epic films of midcentury had leitmotifs in their bloodstream; musical themes would linger in theatergoers’ memories when they emerged from epic films as much as they had for the audiences in Bayreuth. By the late 1960s, the movie epics out of Hollywood had largely run out of steam, except for the brilliantly iconoclastic 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. Long movies, a few of them candidates for the designation of epic, continued to be made in succeeding decades, with fantasy, science fiction and mythology predominating, but the clouds of glory that trailed from Cinerama and 70 millimeter, from uniformed ushers and reverential music and leg-stretching intermissions mostly vanished.

The internet is global and borderless, but regulators in most jurisdictions attempt to ensure the relatively free flow of data and the maintenance of ‘trust’ in the system. Regulators mostly act independently and without any direction from the international community, resulting, unsurprisingly, in a variety of incongruent and incompatible regulations.

The internet relies on a global flow of data, with a growing number of dataintense digital services, utilizing a high amount of data in their production processes. In many cases, the data cross borders multiple times before the service is consumed (van der Marel and Ferracane, 2021), and regulators must therefore appreciate the necessity of cross-border data flows from a trade perspective (World Economic Forum, 2019). The free flow of data is critical to internet-based services (e.g., cloud computing) and e-commerce and essential to the development of technologies that rely on access to high-quality data that often resides in more than one territory. Cross-border data transfers are also important for less obvious reasons, including cross-border health, investigations and medical emergencies (Moorthy, 2020). An example of the last point is the 2013–2016 Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa where deficiencies in data-sharing mechanisms brought the question of data access to the forefront of the global health agenda (Giles-Vernick, et al., 2016).

Through the development and deployment of these data-reliant technologies and solutions, nations and the companies working within those borders can expect to derive increased economic and social values from crossborder data flows. In fact, the data economy has risen even more rapidly in a COVID-19-disrupted world in its importance for new economic growth opportunities (Casalini et al., 2021).

Both countries and industries recognize the importance of keeping global data flows as unrestricted as possible. As this chapter discusses, most governments are increasingly keen to ensure that their rules of data governance are consistent with those of other countries and have begun negotiating trade agreements to ensure the compatibility of standards. Likewise, companies seeking influence intensely lobby at the domestic and international levels for relatively unrestricted data flows. In establishing policies for cross-border data transfers, governments must also be aware that they can only attract inbound transfers of data and information technologies if people, businesses and other governments trust their system and regulatory framework.

In his account of the dramatic rise of Islam that counterbalanced the Roman empire's long, slow descent into ruin, Edward Gibbon registers the claim of the eighth-century caliph Abdalrahman that he experienced only 14 days of unadulterated happiness in his life. Gibbon found this declaration so remarkable that he wrote one of the most personal of his 8,000 footnotes to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “If I may speak of myself (the only person of whom I can speak with certainty), my happy hours have far exceeded, and far exceed, the scanty numbers of the caliph of Spain; and I shall not scruple to add, that many of them are due to the pleasing labour of the present composition” (III. 346, n50). Gibbon's assertion of the pleasures of history-writing is itself worth remarking, given his recurrent grim pronouncements on the nature of history. Early on, he characterizes the source materials of his narrative as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind” (I.102). And in the sixth and final volume, he refers to his project simply as “the history of blood” (III.791). How did Gibbon manage, as he says in the final sentence of his monumental work, to be “amused and exercised near twenty years of my life” (III.1085) with researching, recording, shap¬ing and composing a history so dense with iniquities, catastrophic misjudgments, wanton cruelty and sheer stupidity?

It is perhaps the shaping, more than anything else, that is the key to understanding the pleasure Gibbon took in the epic undertaking of constructing a history that spanned 15 centuries and three continents. “History” is as far removed as possible from what Richardson had in mind when subtitling his novel “the history of a young lady.” Gibbon's act of shaping would need to be strikingly different from Clarissa's microscopic charting of actions and feelings. Nevertheless it may not be surprising that the other great experiment with epic narration in eighteenth-century England should occur in large-scale history-writing. Repeatedly, the authors and many of the critics of the early novel saw it as allied with biography and history rather than with romance and fantasy.

It is a truth universally acknowledged in literary history that the epic poem after Milton was supplanted by the novel. The popular new form of narrative, focused on everyday life rather than on royalty or larger-than-life heroes or mythological and supernatural events, began to appear late in the seventeenth century, not long after the publication of Paradise Lost. Some of the earliest formulations of the novel liked to claim that it is factual, not feigned, and that it differed from the extravagant unrealities of romance narratives, aligning more properly with “history” and “biography.” In the preface to Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe—assuming the role of the “editor” of the manuscript of an actual life-story rather than the author of an invented character's adventures—is explicit: “The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it.” Defoe's artifice became a convention of the prefatory declarations of eighteenth-century novels, but he also had a precursor.

“This is a true story,” Aphra Behn wrote in the Dedication to Oroonoko (1688), often taken to be the first modern novel. Adopting the pretense that in her travels to South America she had encountered and interviewed the slave whose name provides the title of her story, Behn inaugurated the practice of conflating fiction with truth that was at the heart of the realistic novel. “I was myself an Eye-Witness to a great part of what you will find here set down,” Behn lies in her preface. From its beginnings, the novel presented itself as fiction that lies like the truth. This paradox was a crucial element in the transition from epic poem to novel. Paradise Lost had been esteemed for many reasons and one of them was that in choosing the story of the Fall in the garden as his subject Milton had advanced epic to a new plane: His narrative could claim to be and could be perceived as both marvelous and true. The mythological and legendary subjects of earlier epic were rendered obsolete. As Adam and Eve left Eden in the final lines of the poem and headed into the larger, unknown world beyond its borders they entered into the realm of the indisputably real.

Ever since John Dryden rendered the Aeneid into English and Alexander Pope performed the same task for the Iliad and the Odyssey, translation has been a high-prestige outlet for the epic imagination. My facility with Homeric Greek is a happy but now distant memory. Like most other readers I depend now on translators, and some recent versions of Homer make a point of accommodating ancient language and conventions to contemporary usage. Book 23 of the Iliad narrates the funeral games staged by the Greeks to memorialize Patroclus. In a poem as grim as the Iliad, the athletic contests offer one of the few occasions for levity. In his version of the boxing match, Robert Fagles introduces a comic touch of his own when Epeus puts himself forward with a confident boast: “I am the greatest!” That the voice of Muhammad Ali should suddenly break into a poem 3,000 years old shrinks the gap of time between contemporary American readers and the heroes on the plains of Troy. There is a similar effect in Fagles's rendition of the chariot race when Menelaus yells at one of his reckless competitors, “Antilochus—you drive like a maniac! Hold your horses!” The second exclamation evokes a Western wagon train, while the first momentarily visualizes the chariot as a hot rod. When Stanley Lombardo tackled Book 23 a phrase drawn from African American slapstick slipped into Odysseus's prayer to Athena to aid him in the footrace: “Hear me, goddess, and don't fail my feet now.” Athena obliges by causing the race's leader, Ajax, to stumble into a pile of cattle dung. “Shit! The goddess tripped me up,” Ajax complains with an expletive more American than Hellenic. The most recent translator of Homer, Emily Wilson, offers a fast-paced and plainspoken Odyssey with a strong rhythmic beat. Steering clear of Lombardo's vulgarism and Fagles's anachronism, she still strips her lines of the coatings of high style. Unapologetically, in her “translator's note,” she alerts readers to her preference for contemporary demotic language. “My Homer does not speak in your grandparents’ English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own.” Wilson's principle echoes Dryden's ambition for translation, more than three centuries ago: “to make Virgil speak such English, as he himself wou’d have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age.”

Toward the end of his career, Mark Twain was in demand as an after-dinner speaker when he could be counted on for his distinctive blend of stand-up raillery and impromptu cultural criticism. On the evening of 20 November 1900, at New York's Nineteenth Century Club, the main event was Professor Caleb Thomas Winchester's talk on “The Disappearance of Literature.” Asked to make a response, Twain found himself bemused by Winchester's assertion that there were “no modern epics like Paradise Lost.” Surveying his audience, Twain quipped, “I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic—something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” With a move as smooth as a gymnast's dismount, Twain nailed the landing and dispatched at once classical literature in general, Paradise Lost in particular, and the whole prospect of epics in the modern era.

Twain's flippancy was prophetic. As the new twentieth century was about to begin, Paradise Lost's stock was also about to take a nosedive with the emergence of Modernist literature and criticism. The knotty exuberance and quirky images of the “metaphysical” poetry of John Donne and Andrew Marvell were better aligned with Modernist experiment than Milton's oratory and Latinate diction. Caleb Winchester's verdict on the disappearance of epic, to which Twain offered his hearty endorsement, seemed con-firmed at every turn. E. M. W. Tillyard's weighty The English Epic and Its Background appeared in 1954, and it established a lengthy pedigree for the English epic in the classical era and the Middle Ages, with a grand tour of Renaissance epic theory and practice in Italy, England, France and Portugal before reaching Spenser's Faerie Queene and eventually Paradise Lost. After the Milton chapter, there are fewer than a hundred pages given over to “eighteenth-century trends” before Tillyard draws the curtain, having virtually nothing to say about the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, though he prudently declined to “conjecture what will be the fate of the epic in the near future.” His book's large helpings of context for the English epic give almost no attention to post-Miltonic epic.

Laws, regulations and policies are important to the flow of data across borders since they create the certainty that enables the smooth conduct of business; in today's fast-paced world, certainty is a valuable commodity. But laws, regulations and policies alone are not sufficient and could be counterproductive. In order to formulate a proper policy on the management of cross-border data – or arguments why a laissez-faire approach may be preferable to an articulated policy framework – governments must understand the nature of data and data flows today. Towards this end, this chapter provides necessary background by exploring the concurrent developments of the explosive growth in data volume, applications for the use of data and the drivers behind these trends.

The Growth (and Growing Importance) of Data

Data is now one of the world's most valuable resources (The Economist, 2017). In today's digitally transformed world where over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated every day, flow of knowledge and technology lies at the centre of new networks driving production and innovation (Holst, 2021). The increasing use of internet of things (IoT) and the growing amount of data generated and flowing across borders are driving substantial opportunities. This is not surprising as more companies are turning into ‘datavores’, making strong use of data and analysis for decision-making and increasingly big data and artificial intelligence (AI) for a range of initiatives and business operations (Bridges, 2015; Bilodeau, 2019).

Unlike conventional assets, data is non-rivalrous – multiple parties can use the same data concurrently without it being used up and data often gains its value from being combined with other data (Coyle et al., 2021) This makes crossborder data flows – which refers to the movement or transfer of information between computer servers across borders – even more important. Cross-border data flows enable people to easily transmit information for online communication, track global supply chains, share research, combine data, provide cross-border services and support technological innovation (Congressional Reporting Service, 2020). Over the past decade, cross-border data flows have increased global gross domestic product (GDP) by 10.1 per cent (Manyika et al., 2016, 10, 76), and by 2018 data flows had already accounted for US$2.8 trillion of global GDP, surpassing the global trade in goods (GSMA, 2018).

Introduction

Consistent with the phenomenological spirit, the writings of Alfred Schutz are ardently proscientific. At the same time, they provide an essential critique that seeks to ground social science in human subjectivity. A significant share of Schutz's work was methodological in a philosophical sense. It aimed to connect the empirical work of the social sciences to the life-world, the reality of everyday life, a prescientific endeavor. Along those lines, Schutz and Luckmann argue social science should begin where phenomenology ends. They state, “The sciences that would interpret and explain human action must begin with a description of the foundational structure of what is prescientific” (Schutz and Luckmann 1973, 3). Additional support for Schutz's (2011a, 60) contention that phenomenology is a prescientific undertaking can be found in a note written to Talcott Parsons in March 1941 concerning Parsons’ (1937) The Structure of Social Action. Schutz states, “I realized immediately the importance and the value of your system and also the fact that it starts exactly where my own book (Phenomenology of the Social World) ends.” Further support can be found in Schutz's letter to Felix Kaufmann dated September 25, 1945, where Schutz again situates his phenomenological writing. He writes, “My ambition would be to finish, where you begin” (2011b, 213). As for Schutz's ideas about empirical methods, the situation is more complicated.

Schutz was curiously silent about how social scientists should collect data. About such matters, he seems to defer instead to established scientific principles and standards for evidence (1962a, 37). In the absence of statements about empirical methodology, readers are left to infer what he intended. This resulted in two important but related outcomes. First, some sociologists came to frame Schutz as antiscientific, advocating for intuition over empirical method (Schutz 1962b, 99). Second, Schutzian phenomenology also became connected with so-called qualitative research that prioritizes people's accounts of their everyday experiences. Much of this research, it seems, only articulates and categorizes the themes of subjective or lived experiences voiced by their participants (Falvo et al. 2021). Whatever the usefulness of these practices, they have often become equated in a taken-for-granted way as what Schutz intended for the social sciences.

For nearly a hundred and fifty years after Paradise Lost first appeared in 1667, epic poetry in England had largely gone missing. Alexander Pope's grand translation of the Iliad offered a vision of the kinds of heroic ideals in eighteenth-century thinking that we associate with the term “neoclassical.” The elegant rhyming couplets of his translation represented his century's notion of the appropriate metrical form for an epic poem, hence the designation of this form as heroic couplets. But long ago, E. M. W. Tillyard nailed what was missing from Pope's effort at an epic vision. The speeches of Pope's Homeric heroes are polished and aristocratic pronouncements, with phrasing that is exquisitely balanced and sentiments that are self-consciously dignified. Take the dying words of the Trojan ally Sarpedon, as he urges his comrade Glaucus to prevent the Greeks from dishonoring his corpse:

Pope wrote detailed footnotes to his translation, and his comment on this passage from Book 16 is revealing. “If we conceive this said by the expiring Hero, his dying Looks fix’d on his wounded disconsolate Friend, the Spear remaining in his Body, and the Victor standing by in a kind of Extasy surveying his Conquest; these Circumstances will form a very moving Picture.”

Pope's “moving picture” is quite different in texture and intent from the “living pictures” that animate Gibbon's history of the Roman empire. The historian wanted to leaven the conceptual treatment of massive forces at work with microscopic views into individual lives whose examples would ground the concepts in lived experience. Pope's heroes are displayed to picturesque effect, and they speak with an authority and a noblesse oblige designed to impress the multitude. The noble rhetoric that we encounter in his Iliad “ does speak for the ruling classes,” Tillyard wrote, but that wasn't sufficient in the era that saw the rise of the middle-class genre of the novel.

The Controversy over the Sociology of Knowledge

Sociology of knowledge as a new sociological discipline came up in Germany in the early twentieth century as a reflection of the social changes taking place in societies in the course of their modernization. The differentiation of social classes and groups with their different worldviews, ideologies and lifestyles made observable the relations between social positions and the corresponding stocks of knowledge orienting social action. Social mobility enabled individuals to change their social positions during their life courses and let them participate in multiple social circles and roles. The social origins of interpretative schemes and their variety became obvious, as did the pivotal impact of these processes on the social life and on the shaping of societies. Social reality became conceivable as depending on its interpretations by acting subjects and social groups. The relations between these interpretations and their social conditions came into focus of the becoming sociology where the term “knowledge” became extended to all forms of concepts orienting action. The meaningful structure inherent in the social world was reconsidered as a substantial attribute of social reality distinguishing it from the subject of natural sciences (Simmel 1968, 21; Dilthey 1974, 164). Thus, to resolve processes of the social construction of knowledge meant at the same time to mark out the distinctiveness of the social sciences and of their specific subject.

At the stake in this discourse, however, was not only the status of social sciences but also the status of scientific assertions in general. If the knowledge should prove to be a social construction, then all its contents would turn out as relative to the social conditions of its producers. The sociology of knowledge as the science aiming at the social origins of knowledge then could not be considered as a mere subdiscipline of social sciences but would deal with the founding conditions of knowledge in general which, as Robert Merton (1968, 513) has noted, would mean an epistemic “Copernican revolution.” Such an imperial claim, of course, was strongly opposed by the other humanities (Srubar 2010). The discussion within the social sciences themselves, however, focused on two central areas of problems.

On the freezing evening of 2 February 1802, Dorothy Wordsworth reached for her copy of Paradise Lost. She and her brother William had just finished a meal at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. “After tea I read aloud the eleventh book of Paradise Lost,” Dorothy wrote in her journal. “We were much impressed, and also melted into tears.” Although her diary entry is eloquent testimony to the afterlife of Milton's epic and its power to move readers and auditors, this is not an often-cited anecdote. Why not? I suspect it is because of two words: “eleventh book.”

Even some of the great admirers of Paradise Lost have had doubts about how Milton ended his poem. Samuel Johnson's bland observation that “none ever wished it longer than it is” can be taken as an implicit putdown of the art of the last two books. C. S. Lewis was more colorful and unambiguous. He branded the visions and narratives of things to come—the abridged history of humanity from Abel and Cain to the Last Judgment—“an untransmuted lump of futurity.” But if the Wordsworths’ response to Book XI was a minority view, they were nevertheless not alone. Most of that book takes place at the top of a mountain where Adam is offered a panoramic prospect view of the future. The prospect, as we will see in the fourth chapter, was a crucial strategy in Gibbon's pioneering way of writing history, and one of Wordsworth's most dramatic visions was the view from the top of Mount Snowdon in the final book of The Prelude. Christopher Phillips has emphasized that, for aspiring American epic poets during the early Republic and nineteenth century, the “mount of vision”—a prospect view of the future of the “new world”—was a recurrent motif and an undeniable homage to Books XI and XII of Paradise Lost.

There is no doubt that the final books of Paradise Lost settle into a lower key and that the poetry is more subdued than in the other 10. By the time readers finish the tenth book, they may feel that all the good stuff is over: