| 2013 |
“‘Why I’m In It’ x 2 — Antiphonal Response to Stephan Ramsay on Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism”Categories Blog Essays
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Citation: “‘Why I’m In It’ x 2 — Antiphonal Response to Stephan Ramsay on Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism.” Alan Liu, 13 September 2013. https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/why-im-in-it-x-2-antiphonal-response-to-stephan-ramsay-on-digital-humanities-and-cultural-criticism/
i. Prelude
On January 7, 2011, Stephen Ramsay and I both participated in the memorable panel at the Modern Language Association convention in Los Angeles entitled “The History and Future of the Digital Humanities.” We both launched on that day controversial theses about the digital humanities by asking leading questions. Steve asked, “Do you have to know how to code [build, make]?”, and I asked, “Where is cultural criticism in the digital humanities?”
Now, two and a half years on, we have (virtually) converged again at the intersection between questions about the nature of the digital humanities field and questions about its relation to cultural criticism. . . .
I enjoyed reading this, and I’m enjoying the larger interaction. It seems appropriate on several levels to say that you and Ramsay have “converged again,” because the distance between your perspectives doesn’t look very large to me.
It’s clear that you both agree that “DH” (whatever that vaporous entity is) will need to reflect critically on power. You seem to also agree (though I’m a little less sure here) that this reflection may sometimes be embodied in digital practice. In other words, to give a concrete example, we might problematize simple ideas of “privacy” theoretically, but also by showing students how to interpret networks — so they can see why the NSA may not need to open your e-mails in order to extract a surprising amount of their meaning. This is praxis with a reflective, social dimension. (I’d say it’s a version of what we’ve always tried to do with the technology of writing — we want students to write well, which requires a healthy respect for the technology’s power to mediate ideology and simple self-deception.)
If I’m not just imagining these areas of agreement, it seems to me that there’s a lot of consensus here. And though I can’t speak for others, I suspect you and I at least are in agreement about even more specific questions. For instance, I happen to agree that it’s crucial to tease out what you’re calling “meso-level” forms of identity. I’m used to a slightly more sociological language (professions, class fractions, intersectionality, modes of distinction bound up with technology), but I think we’re talking about roughly the same object. I would want to write about that topic if I weren’t already writing other things; since I can’t be in two places at once, I’ll content myself with waiting for your next book, and other books that explore the interface between technology and cultural critique.
Thanks for the comment, Ted. Your second paragraph is an especially good one; I like the example of critical praxis you instance. I’m also very much on the same page with your last paragraph. Indeed, identity-formations like “profession” or “occupation” are of the interstitial kind that I referred to—in this case uneasily straddling personal subjectivity, institutional identity, and class as well as gender and racial/ethnic identities. I’ve been thinking a lot, for example, about the fraught struggle at present in the institutional space between professional and managerial power (the rise of managerialism over professional shared governance), and how that marks out in concrete terms such notions as “neoliberalism” that use the institutional space as a sandbox to remix personal, class, and other identities.
I have also really enjoyed reading both of these pieces, and I think of Ted’s comment above, about DH as “whatever that vaporous entity is” as the heart of the problem I’m having: much writing about this issue of cultural critique feels a lot like “putting the critique before the horse.” Where are the examples? Surely there are DH projects in abundance that could serve as sites for cultural critique (unless the NSA is a new DH project), but they don’t make their way into the more abstract approaches that ask “What do we need,” rather than “what is required for this specific rhetorical instance?” In short, I wish I more fully understood what “digital humanities” means in this context.
In reading a lot of DH debate and twitter hurly-burly, which has admittedly become frustrating for me (and obviously many others, hence these discussions), I’m often reminded of Jane Smiley’s essay on Huck Finn that originally appeared in Harper’s. The effect of that piece was enormous (and the responses plentiful), and it’s one I have returned to repeatedly through the years–Smiley located that critique in an instance/example that required it, and the results were immediate and ground breaking.
So my question is, why are there seemingly so few cultural critiques located in the specifics of existing DH projects (or are there, and they simply don’t meet the needed bar for cultural critique that many are requiring)? Is ORBIS something that requires cultural critique, or is it a different type of digital humanities? How about HyperCities? Mining the Dispatch? Ted Underwood and Weingart’s topic modeling of PMLA? Or maybe Jockers’ recent, very visible work? What about the Whitman archive? Are these the types of project, or work, that qualify as DH requiring a more thorough cultural critique? Or is the intent something else, more along the lines of the digital humanity and solutionism that Morozov sets his sights on? Or are we really talking about institutional issues here that deserve scrutiny regardless of any specific project produced?
Sorry to go on. I guess this is the short version: with so many horses around, and more appearing by the day, why not start attaching carts/critiques to them if that’s what is needed?
As is always the case with your work (and tweets), I enjoyed reading this and thanks for putting all this down for public view.
A really constructive suggestion, Chuck. It’s got me thinking. Someone should start a list of writings/projects exemplifying digital-humanities cultural criticism. However, I would myself wish such an archive could be curated by an editor or community with sufficiently strong roots in both the cultural criticism and DH fields that they can give a sense of when DH is making a unique contribution (or needs to make such a contribution) to cultural criticism. That is, items of the sort, “DH and approaches to culture,” are less important in helping shape the field (and also more predictable) than items of the sort, “DH adds to, extends, changes, or radically questions approaches to culture, academic or popular.”
Thanks so much for the response–such a curated list, of the quality you describe, would be incredibly helpful for folks like myself, who are newer to the DH landscape.
There have been various efforts by groups like #transformDH and DHPoco to curate these projects. Alexis Lothian and I wrote a piece in eMedia Studies gesturing toward this kind of list: http://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/1/xmlpage/4/article/425.
We’ve also been keeping informal track of projects through the #transformDH hashtag on Twitter and also on transformdh.org. Moya Bailey has done a lot to keep the Tumblr/website going by collecting different projects to showcase. We are interested in things that fall outside of the academy, but make a case that they have valuable things to contribute to scholarly knowledge.
It seems that the new DHThis platform might also be a place to attempt such a curation.
“[M]uch writing about this issue of cultural critique feels a lot like “putting the critique before the horse.” Where are the examples?”
The first thing I would say, is that Alan is right to ask “Where is cultural criticism?” because the dispiriting answer is that it is nowhere — or nowhere obviously instantiated.
The most interesting and provocative points of contact for me are those instances in which critics who stand somewhere “between” DH and cultural studies — those conversant with both discourses — try to blend or somehow rectify the two (Tara McPherson, Todd Presner, Mark Marino, Adeline Koh).
I find their answers problematic, but I hope that is understood (in the book, anyway, if not here) that because their answers are skillfully set forth, they therefore provide the best place in which to contemplate the difficulties DH confronts.
It was in the work of those listed above (and of Alan Liu as well), though, that I began to see the difficulty of uniting something called “DH” and something called “cultural studies,” because all these works (in perfect deconstructionist fashion) reveal both the holes and contradictions in cultural studies as a form of normative engagement with the world, and the rising appearance of those same contradictions in DH. The latter — and I think Alan would agree with me — is the more distressing for its almost complete lack of engagement with these issues.
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I will definitely look to the work of those you mentioned, some of which I’m familiar with, but adding this specific context will be very helpful for my explorations here.
Thanks for this, Alan (though I suppose I should be extremely irritated, since it is clear that my book will be made utterly irrelevant by these far more trenchant thoughts on the matter).
“The digital humanities can only take on their full importance when they are seen to serve the larger humanities (and arts, with affiliated social sciences) in helping them maintain their ability to contribute to the making of the full wealth of society, where “wealth” here has its older, classic sense of “well-being” or the good life woven together with the life of good.”
This is precisely why its seems to me that what DH needs, at both the individual and collective level, is an “ethics of engagement” with the world. My hope is that that engagement can avoid being “beached and blocked” precisely by setting forth objects *in the world* that can present humanistic engagement and humanistic ideas in a more positive light.
I am often nonplussed at the repeated charge that DH is “undertheorized,” but I must acknowledge a certain truth to it. DH has nothing like the arc of discourse that began with Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas and which brings cultural studies to its present commitments. It has not, as you say in your original *Debates* piece, even “paused to reflect” on what its ethical engagements might entail.
My thoughts have been influenced lately by reading (of all people) Pierre Hadot, whose books *What is Ancient Philosophy?* and *Philosophy as a Way of Life* (the latter, an absurd rendering of *Exercices Sprituels et Philosophie Antique*) is only coming to the U.S. — due, I think, to Michel Foucault’s unlikely, but sincere admiration for (if not obsession with) his work. Hadot’s thesis is that we have profoundly misunderstood ancient philosophy as a set of discursive ideas (Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, etc.), when in fact those “lovers of wisdom” would have understood their own practice as a way of life — a way of, as you say, being-in-the world.
I think we have lost the sense (in cultural criticism, and even more within in DH) of this idea that humanistic inquiry should lead to particular ways of life — particular choices concerning not merely how to view the world, but how live in it. This is, of course, the original meaning of *ethica*, and I think that if the humanities (including DH conceived as a form of humanistic inquiry, and not merely another branch of STEM) is to survive, it needs to reconceive its entire reason for being. Hadot’s ideas (and I think Foucault saw this) are not at all conservative or old-fashioned. He was not trying to return us to the study of Plato, I think, but trying to show us the very profound difference between pedantry and the quest for “the good life woven together with the life of the good.” I think cultural studies was once precisely this, and I think even though it is ultimately (or once upon a time) a refraction of Marxism, the wider culture might have engaged its ideas more seriously if it had bothered to engage with that culture at all. DH is confronted with exactly the same possibility, and it is naive to thing that just “building things” will avoid the same fate.
Thanks very much for this thoughtful reply, Steve (which continues the colloquy in which we seem to find ourselves). I agree strongly on the issue of “engagement,” a word I have increasingly used (in alliance at times with “service”) to indicate wider spans and modalities of active relationality between DH and society than the narrower words “criticism,” “critique,” or “praxis.” Hadot is new to me, and I look forward to learning about that work, and to your discussions of that work as you proceed with your book. Incidentally, many of the issues you and I have been batting back and forth touch on the rationale for the 4Humanities.org project too.
Dear Alan, thanks for this exciting conversation. I’d like to add my narcissistic bit saying that “Towards a cultural critique of Digital Humanities” (presented at Cologne before I was aware of your Debates in DH piece — I confess!) was one of the first non-Anglo-American contributions to some of the issues discussed above. Not surprisingly, I noticed that little of what I said has entered the rhetorical arena of the US debate on DH. This shows that US-centered DH is suffering from ethnocentrism (or provincialism, depending on your point of view). North-American colleagues have this tendency to universalize every discourse, as DH (or any other discipline to be honest) were without history and geography. I’ve been in this field since 1990, have organized HC international conferences since 1996, but people discovered my existence when I started to criticize their institutions and practices. I don’t complain, but is this fair? My main job is not cultural criticism or cultural studies, but digital philology and textual criticism (I created the firs web site on textual variants in 1996, when only McGann’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti archive and few others literary projects were online). Are we condemned to the perpetual underestimation of our everyday struggle to communicate in another language? And where is cultural criticism without identity and cultural-gender-linguisitic consciousness? Can we have some examples of “good practices” of cultural criticism? Unfortunately we all know in academia it’s much easier to talk and write than to apply and put into practice our opinions and principles. And who dares to apply those principles, must be ready to face the consequences. For example, in order to be free to practice and study DH in Italy, I gave up any idea of progressing in my academic career. I’m happy with it, as I’m a tenured lecturer while many other talented people are not, but I know I’ll never become a professor unless I give up DH. So what? Just an example of how to apply principles, I guess. Anyway, being all this a confirmation of my theories, I guess it’s also rewarding! To be reassured and frustrated, after all, is our post-mode(r)m condition 🙂
I guess I will continue to fight from the margins, from time to time making irrelevant intrusions into the “Empire” …
Watch out!