Critical Spatial Scholarship

There was a brief moment as I read Matthew Wilkens' contribution to Debates in the Digital Humanities where I felt swept along in the dream of a data driven English department. I imagined undecided freshman filing into their undergraduate education. They were confronted with an English department split into two tracks, one traditional the other digital, "data driven". The two tracks shared, of course, a core curriculum. Everyone read a bit of Shakespeare, everyone took at least a basic literary analysis course, and everyone at least heard the name "Foucault" in the same sentence as "sexuality" at some point in their education. Where the tracks differed however was in their commitment to the tradition of close reading or, conversely, to "distant" reading, perhaps even literary mapping (though Moretti's work gives us reason to question the validity of the word "map" to describe his kind of scholarship). The two tracks shared some classes together and spoke a similar scholarly language, but they also had the opportunity to specialize into the particularities of their particular reading commitment. I imagined something similar to a university's multiplicitous engineering offerings: computer, chemical, mechanical, electrical.

My reverie came upon me as I read Wilkens concluding remarks on the necessary displacement of scholarship that must accompany a move by the humanities into broader textual analysis. He says: "If we do that--shift more of our critical capacity to such projects--there will be a couple of important consequences. For one thing, we'll almost certainly become worse close readers." (256) For Wilkens, scholarship is a constant question of opportunity cost. It is this principle of opportunity cost which has kept the canon firmly in place, even after decades of poststructuralist fashionability. We are only so many eyes, Wilkens seems to suggest, and we must consider the cost of directing those eyes elsewhere, away from the two hundred or so sacral texts which anchor the discourse fields of literary scholarship. I will return to this idea in a moment.

Jo Guldi, in her series of blogs on the "spatial turn," seems to suggest a historically traceable trend in myriad fields of scholarship. She likens this "turn" to the linguistic turn with which English departments are far more familiar. Guldi explains that a "turn" is concerned with a retrospective reevaluation. It is the movement of a discourse field in the process of rearticulation according to a newly (re)introduced logic. Thus the spatial turn is the incorporation of spatial logics into seemingly disparate modes of knowledge production. This is not a particularly new phenomenon. Guldi locates the beginnings of the spatial turn in literature before the Civil War. However, in much the same way that digital technologies reinvigorated debates about the history of the book and the canon (even as they effaced the longstanding tradition of exploring both), Guldi sees new tools like GIS as a refreshing force in the application of spatial logic to other fields.

Franco Moretti certainly seems to agree by way of his experimentation with spatial logic in his "Maps" of Graphs Maps Trees. Though he admits that his spatial representations aren't really maps (a map, he says, would find value in a location "as such") they are certainly a spatialization of literary texts. While I like the approach, and I think that his diagrams of various village narratives from the nineteenth century present an otherwise hard-to-see set of information about the genre, it also feels strangely like a kind of close reading as well. The conclusions Moretti draws are, more than most of his claims throughout the text, founded in the question he starts with, and it is never quite clear why he chooses to arrange the texts according to the concentric circle logic that he selects. If this is a kind of shift in textual analysis toward scientific modeling, then it is a very strange shift. The methodology is comprised of thoroughly uninterrogated assumptions about the "best" way to represent the interior spaces of a given series of texts. It is also unclear how this particular methodology could generalize out to other genres of texts, and whether it would even be worth doing.

The diagrams in Wilkens' text seem to me to have much more utility. His net is cast broad enough and his methodology is distant enough from close reading that his conclusions are, I think, genuinely insightful. Sometimes, I am even surprised by what he finds. Most importantly for me, however, is the very specific revisions that his data suggests. This, to me, is the sign of productive scholarly work: surprising conclusions that when properly reckoned, bring about change in the body of knowledge to which it belongs. In the case of Wilkens, the revision is to "American regionalism," a critical historical construct with implications across a whole spectrum of humanities disciplines. I wonder if the difference between Wilkens' work and Moretti's isn't ideological motivation. Moretti's work, while interesting, remains inscrutable to me. It's lively, experimental, and evocative, but only sporadically does it have a political locus. Wilkens, on the other hand, begins with the clearly enunciated assumption that canons are in some way damaging to understanding the human activity we call "literature." This, I feel, is quite different from what Moretti does when his question already contains the answer, as it seems to in "Maps." Wilkens' question has less to do with a hunch about the nature of the texts and more to do with the conviction that these other texts that lie outside the purview of canonization are indeed worth investigation.

Perhaps what the digital humanities have been lacking is neither good ideas nor clever experimentation nor academic rigor. Perhaps it was merely lacking the spine of critique.

Deformity, Praxis, and the Digital Aesthetic Work

Finding a single thing to respond to in Jerome McGann's Radiant Textuality feels like a Sisyphean task - as soon as I think of one topic to criticize (the wanton abuse of the word "quantum" in chapter 7, for instance) or an idea to pick up and push farther (McGann's interesting approach to the development of new critical tools comes to mind) another tangentially related boulder tumbles back down the hill, taking me with it back to square one.On some level, Radiant Textuality's sprawl is a performative product of the subject matter. There's something wry about McGann's shifty text given its conclusions about the limits of the book and the potential of "deformance" to unlock new critical perspectives. Perhaps, in the same sense that it has already been "marked up," Radiant Textuality has already begun to deform under my readerly eye. McGann's multigeneric approach to this text is in and of itself a form of the deformance that he suggests in chapter 4. Radiant Textuality is rife with addendums, appendices, notes, digressions, introductions, prefaces, close readings, dramas, and criticism. It slips with startling fluidity from one form to another, loosening the reader's demands for linear argumentation. It suggests, rather, an internal logic which it describes as it deploys. In other words, Radiant Textuality is the performative enactment of what I take to be one of McGann's central arguments. The lesson we learn from digital humanities projects is not that computational logic displaces the book. Rather, computational logic shows us what was true all along about the books we thought we knew: they were already algorithmic to the core.

Though this implication is potentially interesting, I'm doubtful that it's a terribly revolutionary. It seems the two primary insights to garner from McGann's wandering tour through his quasi-biographical research journal are rather less sexy, but still, I think, quite important. On the one hand, McGann's preference for digital tools for literary criticism seems to rest on his belief that books are in some way an informational subset of computational archival. The book, argues McGann' is a specific kind of informational engine which inscribes its own instructions for consumption in its corpus. Computers are much much better at encoding informational at the indexical level, and therefore, at least when it comes to the marking-up of structural and semantic information (a process which Mcgann seems to equate to criticism) and therefore offer us a new critical vantage point on the books we've always loved. The critic who criticizes using a set of tools that is made of the same stuff as his critical subject, argues McGann, necessarily starts at his task with a significant impairment. Computerization grants the critic the new tools he needs to adequately account for the structural and semantic complexity of bookish algorithm.

The second insight which I take to be particularly interesting is McGann's is his view of deformance as the specific mode of criticism which computational logic unlocks. Beginning from Dickinson, McGann looks to the efficacy of techniques of erasure, isolation, and arbitrary but physical reworkings of texts themselves as textual, typographical objects. Rhymes which were otherwise hidden (think here of Keats) suddenly spring out to digital humanist. Photoshop yields a newly chromatic Blessed Damozel. Herein I find the potential for genuinely illuminating self-reflexivity. It seems that despite all the apparent scientific rigor of digital experimentation, there is something delightful, almost Proustian, about the kinds of accidental aesthetic discoveries that newly mechanized recombinations of analog works, whether literary or otherwise, might enable. There is something refreshingly serendipitous about the whole affair.

I also find McGann's focus on generating a praxis out of his longsuffering sojourn with The Rosetti Archive and then the Ivanhoe Game to be refreshing as well. In his calls for critical praxis he reminds me of his compatriots in OOO who also lament the lack of what Ian Bogost calls philosophical "carpentry" in his book Alien Phenomenology. If some of McGann's formulations are lacking in precision (I'm still not sure why TEI or the OHCO thesis are regarded as important to the digital humanist) or reserve (say quantum one more time...) they make up for it in their self-consciousness. McGann seems genuinely invested in a constant reciprocation between his ideas, their implementations, their results, and the new ideas those results generate. This kind of scholarship seems to be particularly needed in a field which all too often falls into screechy optimism.

Having finished Radiant Textuality, I couldn't help but feel, however, that McGann had left it unfinished. Perhaps that is part of the book's own deformity, but I'd like to push for a moment at what I take to be an enormous oversight in McGann's conceptualization of digital-logic-as-critical-tool. If indeed editing is a critical activity (a proposition I find wholly agreeable) and if the power of the computer to illumine the book lies in its greater efficacy in processing the algorithmic logic which already inheres in its pages, what happens when we turn these critical apparatuses back onto the digital object? Nowhere in Radiant Textuality does McGann seem willing to admit the existence or even the possibility of a rich, wholly digital aesthetic text. I'm left wondering if his particular view of digital humanities could accommodate the relatively straightforward e-reader, let alone the meticulously crafted fictions of Heavy Rain and Spec Ops: The Line, or the vibrant simulated societies and economies of EVE Online. Indeed, the decidedly un-fun structure and implementation of the Ivanhoe Game lead me to believe that McGann, at least at the time of this book's publication has very little experience with the rich world of video games. Given that these objects (aesthetic works that I take to be thoroughly textual) exist on the same logical plane as the computerized critical tools which McGann advocates for deploying upon the analog book, I wonder what kind of critical apparatus McGann would imagine for them if he was given the opportunity. If one of the worthwhile products of the many projects in Radiant Textuality was an uncovering of the computerization's critical power as a deforming agent, how might we begin to imagine a deformed video game? A deformed Kindle? A deformed app? Would McGann even consider these things texts? At the very least McGann gives us some ground on which to start asking these questions, or as McGann might say, to imagine what we don't know.