The Digital Turn: Reflecting on the Digital Capacity for Self Reflexivity

I want to pick up, very quickly, from where I left off with McPherson's suggestion that racial concerns permeate DH covertly, sneaking in perhaps through the back door of UNIX modularization and the logic of fragmented autonomous processes. McPherson likens this "lenticular" logic to holographic postcards which both separate and bring two distinct images into a unitary construct that both highlights their difference even as it covers over their separability. The idea here is that UNIX modularization arose from the same milieu as neo-liberal covert racism. Gone are the days of the lynch mob and the segregated water fountains, only to be replaced by the quietly managed structural racism that made cities like Detroit and Chicago even more racially segregated in the 80s than in the 50s. The logic of modularization, lenticular logic, allows multiple social "processes" to operate under the illusion of autonomy. It covers up the interconnectedness of each module, privileging smooth, uninterrupted, and straightforward articulations of what might actually be rather complex systems. While this may make for elegant computer design, it also describes a rather insidious social situation where the concerns of the margins have no chance to make their plights known to more mainstreamed groups. The screens, in other words, are hidden.

How to begin investigating, let alone solving this problem? If it is true that the very logics upon which DH is predicated begins with the principle of concealment for the sake of cleanliness, how can we turn these digital discourses back on themselves in a critically productive fashion? I believe Johanna Drucker's essay "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship" begins to get at some of the ways the digital can begin to work against its own cultural logic, though perhaps not in the way that she intends to. The basic thrust of Drucker's essay consists of a call for humanistic criticism to play a more central role in what Ramsay would call the practice of "building." Drucker closes her essay thus:

Our challenge is to take up these theoretical principles and engage them in the production of methods, ways of doing our work on an appropriate foundation. The question is not, Does digital humanities need theory? but rather, How will digital scholarship be humanistic without it? (94)

This seems to be basically the same question McPherson asks. It's clear that digital scholarship is effective as a mode of knowledge production, but what in particular makes it useful to the theoretically committed humanist? Both McPherson and Drucker seem to suggest that only by integrating the more traditional modes of humanistic criticism at the level of "building" can we really think about DH as an actually humanistic endeavor.

The trouble is, it doesn't take very long before we run into some imaginative difficulties on this trajectory. What, after all, could Foucauldian code look like? Is it possible to write a computer language that inscribes Marxist critique at the level of Python syntax? The answer right now looks to be unequivocally "no." The computer knows only binary, and criticism necessarily undoes the polarizing work of the either/or construct. Drucker begins to get at this apparent absurdity in her examination of a digital reconstruction of a Roman forum:

If we embark on a project to study inscriptions in the Roman forum, for instance, should we simply take a virtual simulation, a fly-through model made on a standard 3-D software platform and place the writing on the variously appropriate surfaces? Or should the ways signage works as an articulation of space, the species of "spaces" described by Georges Perec, be merged in a mash-up of Christopher Alexander's "pattern language" with Gaston Bachleard's poetics of space and the Foucauldian analysis of spatialized regimes of disciplinary control structured into and structuring architectural and social relations? A ridiculous proposition emerges from that impossible sentence. (92)

This is exactly the trouble with trying to, as McPherson says in relation to race issues in the digital humanities, "hold race and computation together in a systemic manner" (153). There is something about the way computers work - not only internally, but on our own social heuristics - that simply makes sustaining cultural criticism difficulty. It is as if computation necessarily imposes the lenticular modularity that prevents academic cross-pollination and therefore insulates praxis from critique.

At the end of Drucker's frustration, however, she asks whether or not the ridiculous proposition is really ridiculous? Whether the impossible sentence must really be thought of as impossible Drucker's own analysis takes her into a critique of visualization as a way of representing data, that it always distorts and represents incorrectly or ideologically. Though she seems essentially right about this, I would submit, briefly, that this distortion is not a problem as long as it is self-reflexively implemented. Indeed, it seems to me that distortion is the deformative act that McGann wants from the beginning. Perhaps distortion is even what the critical act has always been. However, I want to move past Drucker's critique and entertain for a moment what a digital construction that uses its own tools against itself might look like. How, in other words, might a program "show the screen," not only of itself but of the cultural logic in which its lenticular modularity originated?

I want to suggest that a certain kind of video game is one way of thinking about this possibility. The simulation, it seems to me would make room for dynamically representing the many theoretical considerations Drucker describes in her Roman forum project. Indeed, video games can simulate quite complex ideological structures that make clear the network, not the node, as McPherson might say.  Next time I hope to get into some of the ludic possibilities for DH criticism by way of Paradox Interactive's game Victoria II. If anyone has other ideas of games that might solve some of Drucker's problems, I'd love to hear what you think.

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.