Reading Johanna Drucker’s article this week solidified some of the major concerns I have about the expanding interest in the digital humanities. Her distinction between the digital humanities and speculative computing serves as a jumping off point to examine the potentially insidious, yet simultaneously liberating, nature of information technology.
Drucker’s complaints with the digital humanities echo the philosophical perspective on technology offered by Heidegger in his “Question Concerning Technology.” Heidegger contends that technology enframes objects as what he calls “standing-reserve.” As with everything Heideggerian, the etymological roots of terms like “enframing” and “standing-reserve” complicate his central message, but ultimately, Heidegger is concerned that technology dispels the essence of the objects it confronts, instead treating them as mere fuel for capitalistic consumption. Thus, we lose the ability to see the essential nature of something such as a forest, and instead are forced to view the forest as a resource of trees.
Similarly, the digital humanities threaten to absorb all things poetic, “[disambiguating] knowledge representation so that it operates within the codes of computational processing” (Drucker 5). In effect, the digital humanities attempted to assert a universal mediation upon all knowledge, dissolving the ambiguous (perhaps the poetic) into a stew of usable information. Thus we find that the major projects of the digital humanities (tagging, search codes, digitization of text, etc.) all served to restrain the literary object as a material for consumption by the voracious factories of academia.
Despite Heidegger’s inherently grumpy nature, he does claim “the coming to presence of technology harbors in itself what we least suspect, the possible arising of the saving power” (Heidegger 31). Implicit within the modern technology lies a point of resistance against the de-essencing of our knowledge. Drucker argues that her speculative computing laboratory will produce a new form of knowledge acquisition, lacking in the violent consumptive nature of the digital humanities. Thus, the mechanical problem-solving aspects of the digital humanities are converted into the imaginative ruminations of “quantum interventions,” the formal logic of digital humanities is dismissed for the ‘pataphysics of the post-modernist poets.
I retain some serious concerns even about Drucker’s works, largely based on their inaccessibility to the general populace, but it is refreshing to see the beginning of a resistance to the entrapment and de-essencing of knowledge that seems to be running rampant in cyberspace.
Nice mapping of Heidegger over/through the limits of the rhetoric/practice of the digital humanities. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on Drucker's works and their limits tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteHeidegger's crankiness is well noted, as is the potential for hope held out both by the irascible German and Drucker. I think Drucker's misgivings are well founded, since it is too easy for ideology to hide behind a mask of 'rational empiricism'. Drucker's pointing to the ideology inherent in models can, I feel, be taken one step further.
ReplyDeleteIdeology itself operates as a model, structuring the world and forming the paths and filters through which knowledge moves and in which knowledge forms. The contradictions that modeling forces into submission are those shearing points, locations of instability, that trouble every model, the places of 'Murphy's Law' where the best laid plans, so on and so forth.
The hope is that through laying bare models and permitting their direct investigation and manipulation, we can gain valuable insight on the ideological structures through which we, as subjects of knowledge, move.
But I would like to point to another hope, or at least another benefit of 'de-essencing' or, at least, the 'de-auraing' of poetics. While there is risk that forcing poetics into analytic systems and digital modes will transform the irrational, ambiguous portions of that knowledge that compose its essence, there is also value in noticing those ideological/model-based systems that are in fact inherent in poetry/art/literature. And de-mystification serves a salient political purpose, reducing the cult quality that Walter Benjamin levels against in 'Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. While it is our duty to seek out those 'bugs' in the systems of knowledge that literature presents to us, the reflexive loops and system-crashing absences that produce subversion and thus freedom within ideological structures, comprehension of the tropes and rhetorical regularities can make visible and transparent artistic processes that previously were viewed as a matter of closed, artistic knowledge, while simultaneously revealing the rhetoric that makes art, often presented as a-political, ideological tools in a manner that could be more visible and more accessible to larger groups of people. And the digital makes this visibility more possible. Or should. Accessibility is mentioned in the above post, and rightly so, for the increase of access is a (potentially) great (potentially) redemptive aspect of humanities in the digital era.
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