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[January 9, 2012, 9:00 pm
The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality
By STANLEY FISH
This is a blog. There, I’ve said it. I have been resisting saying it — I have always referred to this space as a “column” — not only because “blog” is an ugly word (as are clog, smog and slog), but because blogs are provisional, ephemeral, interactive, communal, available to challenge, interruption and interpolation, and not meant to last; whereas in a professional life now going into its 50th year I have been building arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive and, most important, all mine.
In “Changing Places” and “Small World,” the novelist David Lodge fashions a comical/satirical portrait of a literary critic named Morris Zapp, whose ambition, as his last name suggests, is to write about a topic with such force and completeness that no other critic will be able to say a word about it. The job will have been done forever. That has always been my aim, and the content of that aim — a desire for pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power — is what blogs and the digital humanities stand against.
The point is made concisely by Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her new book, “Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy”: “… a blog privileges immediacy — the newest posts appear first on the screen and older posts quickly lose currency…. This emphasis on the present works at cross purposes with much long-form scholarship, which needs stability and longevity in order to make its points.”
As Fitzpatrick well sees, long-form scholarship — books and articles submitted to learned journals and university presses — needs more than that. It needs the interdependent notions of author, text and originality. In the traditional model of scholarship, a credentialed author — someone with a Ph.D. or working toward one — gets an idea (that’s the original part) and applies it to a text or a set of problems, and produces, all by himself, a new text that is offered to readers with the promise that if they follow (that is, submit to) it, they will gain an increase in understanding and knowledge. Fitzpatrick comments: “It is … not enough that the text be finished; it also has to be new, springing entirely from the head of the author, and always distinguishing itself from the writing of other authors.”
Fitzpatrick contends, first, that authorship has never been thus isolated — one always writes against the background of, and in conversation with, innumerable predecessors and contemporaries who are in effect one’s collaborators — and, second, that the “myth” of the stand-alone, masterful author is exposed for the fiction it is by the new forms of communication — blogs, links, hypertext, re-mixes, mash-ups, multi-modalities and much more — that have emerged with the development of digital technology.
The effect of these technologies is to transform a hitherto linear experience — a lone reader facing a stable text provided by an author who dictates the shape of reading by doling out information in a sequence he controls — into a multi-directional experience in which voices (and images) enter, interact and proliferate in ways that decenter the authority of the author who becomes just another participant. Again Fitzpatrick: “we need to think less about completed products and more about text in process; less about individual authorship and more about collaboration; less about originality and more about remix; less about ownership and more about sharing.”
“Text in process” is a bit of an oxymoron: for if the process is not occurring with an eye toward the emergence of a finished artifact but with an eye toward its own elaboration and complication — more links, more voices, more commentary — the notion of “text” loses its coherence; there is no longer any text to point to because it “exists” only in a state of perpetual alteration: “Digital text is, above all, malleable … there is little sense in attempting to replicate the permanence of print [itself an illusion, according to the digital vision] in a medium whose chief value is change.” (Fitzpatrick)
Nor is there any sense in holding on to the concept of “author,” for as Fitzpatrick observes, “all of the texts published in a network environment will become multi-author by virtue of their interpenetration with the writings of others.” Fitzpatrick insists that there will still be a place for individual authors, but with a difference: the collective, she says, should not be understood as “the elimination of individual, but rather as … a fertile community composed of multiple intelligences, each of which is always working in relationship with others.”
But this is just like “text in process”: if the individual is defined and constituted by relationships, the individual is not really an entity that can be said to have ownership of either its intentions or their effects; the individual is (as poststructuralist theory used to tell us) just a relay through which messages circulating in the network pass and are sent along. Mark Poster draws the moral: “[T]he shift … to the globally networked computer is a move that elicits a rearticulation of the author from the center of the text to its margins, from the source of meaning to an offering, a point in a sequence of a continuously transformed matrix of signification” (“What’s the Matter With the Internet?”, 2001).
Meaning everywhere and nowhere, produced not by anyone but by everyone in concert, meaning not waiting for us at the end of a linear chain of authored thought in the form of a sentence or an essay or a book, but immediately and multiply present in a cornucopia of ever-expanding significances.
There are two things I want to say about this vision: first, that it is theological, a description its adherents would most likely resist, and, second, that it is political, a description its adherents would most likely embrace.
The vision is theological because it promises to liberate us from the confines of the linear, temporal medium in the context of which knowledge is discrete, partial and situated — knowledge at this time and this place experienced by this limited being — and deliver us into a spatial universe where knowledge is everywhere available in a full and immediate presence to which everyone has access as a node or relay in the meaning-producing system. In many theologies that is a description of the condition (to be achieved only when human life ends) in which the self exchanges its limited, fallen perspective for the perspective (not a perspective at all) of union with deity, where there is no distance between the would-be knower and the object of his cognitive apprehension because, in Milton’s words, everyone and everything is “all in all.”
The obstacle to this happy state is mortality itself. To be mortal is to be capable of dying (as opposed to going on and on and on), and therefore of having a beginning, middle and end, which is what sentences, narratives and arguments have: you start here and end there with the completed thought or story or conclusion (quod erat demonstrandum).
What both the religious and digital visions offer (if only in prospect) is a steady yet dynamic state where there is movement and change, but no center, no beginning and end, just all middle (as the novelist Robert Coover saw in his piece “The End of Books,” The New York Times, June 21, 1992.) Delivered from linearity, from time-bound, sharply delineated meanings, from mortality, from death, everyone, no longer a one, will revel in and participate in the universal dance, a “mystical dance” of “mazes intricate, / Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular / Then most when most irregular they seem, / And in their motions harmony divine / So smooths her charming tones, that God’s own ear / Listens delighted.” (John Milton, “Paradise Lost,” V, 620, 622-627)
Now, no one in the digital humanities community talks like that, although they do speak, as Fitzpatrick does, of the “impoverished” medium of print (implying the availability of a medium more full and authentic), and they do predict, without very many specifics, a new era of expanding, borderless collaboration in which all the infirmities of linearity will be removed.
Chief among those infirmities are the institutions that operate to keep scholar separated from scholar, readers separate from the creation as well as the consumption of meaning, and ordinary men and women separate from the knowledge-making machinery from which they are excluded by the gate-keeping mechanisms of departments, colleges, universities, university presses and other engines dedicated to the maintaining of the status quo.
This is the political component of the digital vision, and it is heard when Fitzpatrick writes that “access to the work we produce must be opened up as a site of conversation not just among scholars but also between scholars and the broader culture”; when The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 tells us that while the period since World War II has seen “the proliferation of ever smaller and more rigorous areas of expertise and sub-expertise and the consequent emergence of private languages and specialized jargons,” the digital humanities “is about integration” and the practice of “digital anarchy”; when Matthew Kirschenbaum calls for the dissemination of scholarship apart from “the more traditional structures of academic publishing, which … are perceived as outgrowths of dysfunctional and outmoded practices surrounding peer review, tenure and promotion” (“What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments,” ADE Bulletin, Number 150, 2010); when Michael Shanks promotes a “deep interdisciplinarity” or “transdisciplinarity” that is not “premised upon longstanding disciplinary borders” (Artereality).
The rhetoric of these statements (which could easily be multiplied) is not one of reform, but of revolution. As Mark Sample puts it, “It’s all about innovation and disruption. The digital humanities is really an insurgent humanities.” The project is insurgent in relation, first, to the present exclusionary structures of access and accreditation and, second, to the hegemony of global capitalism of which those structures are an extension. Digital humanities, declares the Manifesto, “have a utopian core shaped by its genealogical descent from the counterculture-cyberculture of the ’60s and ’70s. This is why it affirms the value of the open, the infinite, the expansive [and] the democratization of culture and scholarship.”
It is, then, a left agenda (although the digital has no inherent political valence) that self-identifies with civil liberties, the elimination of boundaries, a strong First Amendment, the weakening or end of copyright and the Facebook/YouTube revolutions that have swept across the Arab world.
The ambitions of the digital humanities are at times less grand and more local. The digital humanities is viewed by some of its proponents as a positive response to the dismal situation many humanists, especially younger ones, now find themselves in. The movement, Kirschenbaum reports, has been “galvanized by a group of younger (or not so young) graduate students, faculty members … who now wield the label ‘digital humanities’ instrumentally amid an increasingly monstrous institutional terrain defined by declining public support for higher education, rising tuitions, shrinking endowments, the proliferation of distance education and the for-profit university, and underlying it all, the conversion of full-time, tenure-track academic labor to a part-time adjunct workforce.”
The digital humanities, it is claimed, can help alter that “monstrous terrain” in at least two ways. The first is to open up the conversation to the public whose support the traditional humanities has lost. If anyone and everyone can join in, if the invitation of open access is widely accepted, appreciation of what humanists do will grow beyond the confines of the university. Familiarity will breed not contempt, but fellowship. “Only in this way,” Fitzpatrick declares, “can we ensure the continued support for the university not simply as a credentialing center, but rather as a center of thought.”
The second way the digital humanities can help, or so it is said, is it to confer on students skills that will be attractive to employers inside and outside the academy. In a forthcoming piece (“The Humanities and the Fear of Being Useful,” in Inside Higher Education), Paul Jay and Gerald Graff argue that “because students in the digital humanities are trained to deal with concrete issues related to intellectual property and privacy,” they will be equipped “to enter fields related to everything from writing computer programs to text encoding and text editing, electronic publishing, interface design, and archive construction.” Get into the digital humanities and get a job. Not a bad slogan.
I am aware that in this decidedly abstract (and linear) discussion I have still said nothing at all about the “humanities” part of digital humanities. Does the digital humanities offer new and better ways to realize traditional humanities goals? Or does the digital humanities completely change our understanding of what a humanities goal (and work in the humanities) might be?
The pertinent challenge to this burgeoning field has been issued by one of its pioneer members, Jerome McGann of the University of Virginia. “The general field of humanities education and scholarship will not take up the use of digital technology in any significant way until one can clearly demonstrate that these tools have important contributions to make to the exploration and explanation of aesthetic works” (“Ivanhoe Game Summary,” 2002). What might those contributions be? Are they forthcoming? These are the questions I shall take up in the next column, oops, I mean blog.]
Bob Neveritt
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