I’m looking to extend a conversation from recent posts by Stephen Ramsay and Alan Liu, which are in turn parts of a longer conversation that includes Liu’s essay in the Debates in the Digital Humanities, the “dark side of DH” business, and the general intersection of DH and cultural critique. The intellectual projects Ramsay and Liu describe run parallel to my own ongoing book project, though I am coming from a digital rhetoric perspective rather than the humanities computing wing of DH. For those who are not familiar at all with this conversation, basically this is about responding to the cultural critique of digital humanities. This takes several generic forms.
- Because programming languages and computer science reproduce hegemony (and here feel free to put in patriarchy, capitalism, etc.), making use of these puts one in service to those interests. And serving those interests is bad… just in case you didn’t know, so the point is that one should stop doing that and do this other thing, which may or may not be specified in the argument, but generally ends up meaning that one should end up moving in whatever direction cultural critique points.
- The same argument except insert social media, the web, and consumer grade technologies (e.g. mobile phones, video cameras, video games).
- The same argument but leveled directly at particular DH projects.
The one “nice” thing about cultural critique is that you can always count on it to make the same argument. I think it’s safe to say that Ramsay and Liu have more generosity toward critique than I do. Ramsay writes “Writing a book contra cultural studies seems to me to be the wrong direction entirely. I would like to make positive statements about what we’re doing, about why it’s different, and about the ethical problems it raises. The insights of cultural criticism are not so easily dismissed.” I understand Ramsay’s position, especially from within the DH world where speaking against cultural studies is likely to result in a lot of vitriol being sent in one’s direction. Actually, it’s all too easy to critique critique: because everything is always already subject to critique, and critique is interminable. Cultural critique is its own disciplinary hegemony, reproducing itself. It’s the thought police of the humanities, posing as skepticism but assailing its detractors as automatically being willing or (perhaps even worse) unwitting servants of hegemony.
But I agree with Ramsay that it is not worth doing that, but maybe for different reasons. For me, critiquing critique just feeds back into the same machine. The point is to move on from critique and do something different.
So here are some ideas in the spirit of moving on.
- Treat critique as a heuristic. Critique isn’t going anywhere and anything you do can be critiqued a half-dozen ways. So critique will also give you something new to do. You just shouldn’t treat critique as if it is telling you some horrible truth.
- Treat critique like your parents. You can love critique because it nurtured you through your intellectual growth. And you can remember how critique used to tower over you, appearing as an absolute authority. Maybe critique made you feel safe. Maybe it would scold or punish you. Maybe critique abused you. I don’t know. But now that we are all adults, we can see critique is just as screwed up and lost as the rest of us.
- Treat critique as a machine. It does certain things. It has inputs and outputs. It’s predictable when it is operated according to the established instructions. It’s true in the way a hammer or telescope or automobile is true. That is to say that it is true to itself.
Admittedly those ideas are presented with some humor and lightness. Critique believes in itself and sees itself locked in a death match with evil. Understandably it can be humorless. Of course injustice and evil and what not existed prior to critique. The questions of ethical and moral behavior, the challenges of making lived experience better, and the dangers of confronting those who act unethically existed prior to critique. We need to be able to question critique as a method without denying the importance of the objects critique studies. We also need to recognize that the particular modes of attack on all things digital by cultural critique may be fueled by disciplinary paradigms and historical contexts.
For example, Ramsay observes:
At the most basic level, we wonder what it means to use the tools handed down to us by corporations (Twitter, Facebook, mobile devices, etc.) to do something that is supposedly (to quote Google) “not evil.” We might just want a cup of coffee, but we are walking into Starbucks to get it. We also, I think, tend to “track” corporate trends. They get into mobile, we get into mobile. They get into data mining, we get into data mining. So asking whether we “channel, advance, or resist” is a good question. A serious question. A book-length question.
I think this is a good question to ask. It’s a question I would put into the context of how corporate, hegemonic technologies and processes like typewriters (built by arms manufacturers like Remington and Holocaust collaborators like IBM), printing presses, electrification, telephony, and so on (all the trappings of the second industrial revolution) were handed to the humanists of the early 20th century. How journals, monographs, and academic conferences followed corporate trends. And we should think about the reverse trend as well… how corporations make the literacy and cultural criticism we give our students productive. It’s a good question to ask: why do cultural critics want to attack DH methods, while ignoring that the print humanities have always had an equal complicity with the military-industrial complex? After all, it should be fairly obvious that publishing a monograph requires one to become as immersed in marketplace forces and corporate technologies as posting to a blog. Teaching 15 students in a seminar room serves hegemony just as well as teaching 15000 in a MOOC (maybe better since MOOCs are so ineffective pedagogically).
The problem might be that critique is something of a blunt instrument. Maybe I’ve only presented it as such here. No doubt it would take more than 1000 words to pursue this argument with care. I am generally with Latour here. I would no more deny the realities of human suffering and injustice than I would deny climate change. I would argue that our understanding of these conditions is flawed as critique stands like a house of cards on a modern ontological worldview that doesn’t work. I see the humanities cultural critique of the digital as driven by a disciplinary methodological paradigm that wants to keep churning. In short the response to cultural critique should not respond to the critiques themselves (unless one finds them heuristically useful). Instead, we need to investigate a different ontological mode (and the methods it might suggest) and recognize the inertial drag of our print legacy on our disciplines.
So, for example, I think Liu is asking some very important questions at the end of his post:
How can digital methods be used to uncover what I called micro-, meso-, and macro-level identity formations that unpredictably and rhizomatically link between “individuals,” “groups,” “classes,” “nations,” and “globalism”? For example, what is the human meaning–-i.e, the affordance for significant human understanding, action, and interaction–-of viral biopolitics at the cellular and sub-cellular level; of equally but differently viral contagions of influence at the institutional level (where corporations and governments, for instance, today infect universities through the vectors of MOOC’s, “accountability” measures, “impact” studies, etc.); and of truly global-scale flows of information-cum-capital?
But I wouldn’t feed this investigation back into the language of cultural critique. I am very interested in how the university conceives of digital literacy–the policies, curriculum, pedagogies, and other investments that are made in this vein both in terms of undergraduate teaching and faculty scholarship. In fact, you could say this is the overarching topic of my work. I want to understand how these systems/networks/assemblages/objects operate. I do not want to begin with the answer to the question, as cultural critique would. I want to create understanding, tools, and activities in this arena that try to make the world better, even though I only have a provisional and localized understanding of what “better” might be and how to achieve it. But they will never satisfy critique. So what?