Wednesday, March 27, 2013

The Conversation Ramsay Gets Us


I left off last week with the argument that perhaps the rather productive threat of DH to the rest of the humanities lies in its allegiance to the TOPLAP creed, “down with obscurantism!” I still take that to be one of the more provocative ideas that Stephen Ramsay gave us in his live casting experiment with Andrew Sorensen. It seems to me to have obvious political ramifications, the likes of which arise out of a fairly heady mixture of art-collective polemic, critical theorizing, and artisinal craftsmanship. It is also why, in part, I feel compelled to defend Ramsay from some of Golumbia's and perhaps even Natalia Cecire's criticisms of his essay On Building.

To my eyes, On Building is a relatively straightforward essay that does two things for Ramsay. First, Ramsay further articulates his position as a "builder" in DH - one who participates in acts of digital "construction." Secondly, the essay fends off hostility from the broader humanities by re-situating earlier claims he made about his commitment to the actual, ground level engagement with code that he believes is necessary to the work of the digital humanist. The essay's virtues are certainly limited in scope, but still relatively clear. It articulates a clear ethos for Ramsay's conception of the digital humanities (and I think it's important, by the way, that we begin discussing whose digital humanities we are talking about when we use the term). I like his inclusion of the term "procedural literacy." It's clear that what Ramsay thinks is (or wants to be) unique about the digital humanities is its unique position to actually craft the tools of study that we humanities folk use to make our arguments. Perhaps, even, if we're lucky, Ramsay thinks we might write some code that in and of itself enacts a theoretical perspective.

Certainly the essay has its limits, but I was surprised at some of the arguments that the ideologically opposed Golumbia and the somewhat more sympathetic Cecire launch at Ramsay here. Their complaints seem largely predicated on what I find to be a rather strange reading of Ramsay's text - though this particular reaction to the more optimistic DH works that we've read this semester seems fairly common. Both Golumbia (in his comment on Ramsay's blog as well as in the article circulated through our seminar) and Cecire (in her introductory essay for the Winter 2011 edition of The Journal of Digital Humanities) take Ramsay's entire argument to be predicated on a displacement of traditional, close-reading-based theoretical work by this new focus on "building." Golumbia seems to believe that Ramsay's version of DH is divorced from ideological moorings and that this divorce somehow absolves the craftsman from the burden of self-reflexive critique. In the essay we read, Golumbia relies on personal anecdote to ground his criticism of Ramsay:
In my experience, truly committed DHers are often just those who resist being taught to read, especially being taught to read politically, and do not "love" to read this [in the mode of politicized interpretation] way at all. (9)
Though she is a good deal more gracious in her critique, Cecire seems to harbor a similar concern. For Cecire, she sees in Ramsay a dangerous propensity to privilege methodology over ideology in the kind of scholarship he promotes. She worries that the "happy fault" of Ramsay's methodologizing signals a divestment of the power of "doing" to signify. The concern, unless I misread her, is that Ramsay's way of including the constructive along with the deconstructive act leads not to a broader inclusion of scholarship but rather to the inevitable decline of criticism as the privileged scholarly act. If I felt convinced that the relationship between the deconstruction in Theory and the construction of "building" was an essentially inverse one, I would sympathize with both Golumbia and Cecire a bit more.

However, in both Reading Machines and "On Building," I fail to see any divorcement between theoretical self-reflexivity and Ramsay's acts of digital construction. Likewise, it seems bizarre to accuse someone with such obvious commitment to criticism (I'm thinking here of his relatively conventional blending of the algorithmic and the theoretical in Reading Machines) to somehow believe that Ramsay has lost ideological grounding. He seems quite happy to admit that "building" has ideological commitments, and equally happy to entertain objections to that end. Moreover, he implicitly legitimates the practice of critical self reflection after and throughout a DH project in his various, again, rather conventional publications. Indeed, DH for Ramsay is a way of "showing the hidden screens" of more broad assumptions that undergird humanities praxis. This seems to me a fundamentally critical act.

I do, however, see Ramsay's piece (as well as Moretti's and even, to a lesser extent, Wilkens) open to significant and provocative criticism is in the article by Tara McPherson in Debates in the Digital Humanities. McPherson's piece, "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?" asks a crucial question that Ramsay virtually necessitates in his pervasive reliance on blue collar, male metaphors of economic production for his romantic depiction of the work of the digital humanist. Working from the rather obvious omission of race in much of the work that DH has generated, McPherson suggests that there might be something inherent to the language of computers as it has developed through UNIX coming out of the sixties that keeps race concerns out of sight and out of mind. She wonders,
Might we ask whether there is not something particular to the very forms of electronic culture that seems to encourage just such a movement, a movement that partitions race off from the specificity of media forms? Put differently, might we argue tha tthe very structures of digital computation develop at least in part to cordon off race and contain it? Further, might we come to understand that our own critical methodologies are the heirs to this epistemological shift? (143)
These questions get at, I think, an actual critique of Ramsay's underlying ideology rather than a straightforward rejection of his methodology. And, from the language of Ramsay's article "On Building," it seems like a worthy investigation. Return to Cecire who asks why the digital humanist must build rather than weave, foregrounding the gender skew that seems implicit in DH work. I'm not quite sure yet whether or not I buy all of McPherson's argument about the relation between racial unrest in the sixties and the sudden shift toward modular computer language, but it at the very least seems like the right kind of conversation to be having.

1 comment:

  1. Since you've invoked me, I'll take the time to mention that by eliminating the most salient phrase from Ramsay's piece, you are able to cast as my "strange reading" the literal text of Ramsay's essay and of the meaning he himself takes it to have: he describes DH as a "move from reading to making." "Move from... to." That does not read, as you take it to, "building is also good." It says we are moving away from reading and to building: he, not I, suggest there is a move away from reading. If his piece simply said "building is also good," my objection would be much less pointed.

    On a personal note, I don't think Stephen actually believes this for his own practice, but even he admits it's what he wrote and that he meant it that way. However, I have encountered many DHers who do appear to believe that building should replace reading and interpreting for scholars of English, and I find the claim untenable.

    ReplyDelete