Well, I’ve been pondering this little bit for a little while. Feel free to comment, critique, rebuild…
This session idea was inspired by a few things coming out of the recent “Rise of the Digital Humanities” MLA 2011, and two related discussions/provocations.
- The first is by Alan Liu (“Where’s the Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”). Liu argues that “[h]ow the digital humanities advance, channel, or resist the great postindustrial, neoliberal, corporatist, and globalist flows of information-cum-capital, for instance, is a question rarely heard in the digital humanities associations, conferences, journals, and projects with which I am familiar.”
- The second is an interesting provocation by fellow THATCamper and Brittain Fellow Andy Famiglietti (“What Does it Mean to do the Humanities?”) in which he poses a question about the model of teaching values: “as much as I like this definition [humanities teach important artistic, cultural, and critical values], I don’t always sleep comfortably with it. It seems to imply that, without the organized study of the humanities, cultures would lapse into collections of mechanistic drones, unable to consider questions of truth or beauty. This simply isn’t true. I’ve seen the inside of technical cultures, geek enclaves and hacker freeholds and they are full of wonder and poetry. Algorithms for decrypting DVDs transformed into epic poems. Romantic jokes about the Fibonacci sequence. Furthermore, again, ask any anthropologist and cultural value is what they do. What’s our niche?”
I think that Famiglietti’s question can open a fruitful discussion for how digital applications can transform or redefine what the humanities do. If, as Bruno Latour recently argued in “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’,” critique “ran out of steam” because “it was predicated on the discovery of a true world of realities lying behind a veil of appearances,” what can the emphasis on building and creating in the digital humanities do to address the issues Liu presents above (474-5)? Or, alternatively, do the digital humanities need to identify with something essentially “humanistic” or have something to do with “cultural criticism” in order to be worthy of the name? If not, what’s the niche of the digital humanities? What do digital humanists do?
Reference
Latour, Bruno. “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’.” New Literary History. 41 (2010): 471-90.
#1 by Pete on February 23, 2011 - 12:09 pm
I would thoroughly enjoy this discussion and, should we have it, will be glad that I’ve had time to look up sources to justify a position. Thanks for suggesting it Roger and Andy.
#2 by Michael Altman on February 23, 2011 - 8:36 pm
I really like the question you bring up through Liu. I’m new to DH but I come to it with an interest in critical theory and studies of power. I have yet to find DHers engaged in real cultural critics of capitalism and power. How can tools developed by capitalism be turned into tools of critique of modernity and global capital? Like Pete, I need to read up on this first, but I find it an important question.
#3 by Pete on February 23, 2011 - 9:24 pm
Ah. Michael, you are speaking my language because a) I am new to DH and b) those questions you raise remind of me of a concept I have heard and considered a ton, but not much inside the DH discourse: hegemony. Is the use of digital discourse, technology, and methodology always a democratizing process? I worry that point is too often assumed to be a given.
#4 by Michael Altman on February 23, 2011 - 9:34 pm
Pete, it makes me think about Gramsci’s idea of hegemony insofar as hegemony often involves consent–in what ways does hesitance to critique the political economy involved in various aspects of DH preserve such consent?
(I didn’t think I’d have to brush up on my Gramsci for THATCamp.)
#5 by Roger Whitson on February 24, 2011 - 7:56 am
I like what both of you are saying. REALLY interesting stuff. Here’s my thought:
1) Is hegemony composed? If so, what can a DH scheme set on building (perhaps rather than critique) do to add a different perspective on the longstanding issue of hegemony?
2) Is DH simply sidestepping cultural studies issues, as Liu seems to think, or is there something more fundamental going on in the realm of political organization that requires a different sort of response that DH is particularly well suited to. In this sense, I think we could look to Latour’s argument about composition vs. critique.
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#6 by Brian Croxall on February 28, 2011 - 8:54 pm
So I’m far enough out of graduate school (almost three years!) that I’m almost certain to be getting in over my head, but my initial thoughts on reading this discussion is why we assume that digital humanities should, as Michael put it, be “engaged in real cultural critics of capitalism and power”? Why the assumption that there must be a political edge (and one that seeks to critique capitalism and power) to DH?
Now, of course, all things are political. And if we’re talking the personal positions of our scholarship, they’re bound to become more political still. But…there’s the possibility that DH offers a way around the perils of the polemic. From my perspective, DH presents us with an adaptable methodology for doing the humanities. In some cases, it may very well make it easier to understand humanities scholarship. As I’m wont to say (and as I probably will say at least once over the weekend), not everyone can read a monograph, but most people can read a map. If you base a literary argument off a map rather than Derrida, Deleuze, or De Chirico (alliteration FTW), then you might be able to help people better understand why the humanities matter.
As for the use value of the humanities…well, I’ll let Marx talk on that point: “To begin with, a commodity, in the language of the English economists, is ‘any thing necessary, useful or pleasant in life,’ an object of human wants, a means of existence in the widest sense of the term. “
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#7 by Roger Whitson on March 1, 2011 - 8:06 am
Brian,
I think Latour’s article is very helpful here. He’s all about politics, but suggests that the lack of a shared reality after postmodernism makes critique somewhat useless. In other words, the idea of critique is based upon believing that something real needs to be revealed to people who (after seeing it revealed) would suddenly say “ah! yeah, that’s true! Why didn’t I think of that before?”
So, another way to approach this issue (and one that would embrace mapping), is to question whether the best way to approach a “political edge” to DH is through the act of critique. And in this instance, I feel, a map isn’t there so much to demonstrate or to critique a reality that lies behind a veil of appearances, but to really create or compose the “means of existence” for a given social movement or gathering. I would think this is what’s behind David Parry’s recent discussion of the uprisings in Egypt and Libya. Social Media, he argues, allows people to come together in ways that they simply didn’t before. So that when the “internet was turned off,” those associations were already formed and people could go out on the street to protest knowing that others were backing them up.
#8 by melanie.kohnen on March 1, 2011 - 1:00 pm
As I already told you in person, such an important question. I think DH should face up to the issues raised by Pete and Michael. Technology, especially digital technology, isn’t just a tool. Digital technology is (obviously, I’d say) embedded in structures of capitalism and power; moreover, it has become a crucial method of facilitating means of control and power. For that reason, I think it’s important for us to consider which technological tools we are using and with what consequences. This might seem to veer off from your initial proposal, but hopefully not too far.
As an example of a DH project that is tool and critique at once, check out Documenteur: Im/mobility and Otherness in Los Angeles (documenteur.wordpress.com/). I find this project exciting because it builds an archive but it is more than just a resource.
#9 by Brian Croxall on March 1, 2011 - 8:46 pm
Roger, thanks for your points. I haven’t had time to read Dave’s essay (although I’ve got it Read-it-Later’ed), and I will have to do the same with the Latour. If I understand what you’re saying, however, it seems like social media eschews critique and becomes the basis for the political. I think that that’s right. It doesn’t mean, as Melanie points out, that social media (which we cannot equate with DH) is embedded in structures of capitalism and power. But that it provides a site of interesting resistance (I’m thinking Gramsci here) to those selfsame structures.
At the same time, let me just say (and risk being stripped of my English PhD) that I think one thing that is refreshing to me about DH is that it’s not been bogged down in the discourses of theory in the same way that much of the rest of the humanities has been. Not that I don’t love my theory. But it’s nice to be building something rather than just be deconstructing all the time. Theory is in many ways a mug’s game, to lift from J. Hillis Miller.