David Golumbia – b2o: boundary 2 online

b2o: boundary 2 online

David Golumbia — The Digital Turn
David Golumbia

Is there, was there, will there be, a digital turn? In (cultural, textual, media, critical, all) scholarship, in life, in society, in politics, everywhere? What would its principles be?

The short prompt I offered to the contributors to this special issue did not presume to know the answers to these questions.

That means, I hope, that these essays join a growing body of scholarship and critical writing (much, though not by any means all, of it discussed in the essays that make up this collection) that suspends judgment about certain epochal assumptions built deep into the foundations of too much practice, thought, and even scholarship about just these questions.
- In “The New Pythagoreans,” Chris Gilliard and Hugh Culik look closely at the long history of Pythagorean mystic belief in the power of mathematics and its near-exact parallels in contemporary promotion of digital technology, and especially surrounding so-called big data.
- In “From Megatechnic Bribe to Megatechnic Blackmail: Mumford’s ‘Megamachine’ after the Digital Turn,” Zachary Loeb asks about the nature of the literal and metaphorical machines around us via a discussion of the 20th century writer and social critic (and) Lewis Mumford’s work, one of the thinkers who most fully anticipated the digital revolution and understood its likely consequences.
- In “Digital Proudhonism,” Gavin Mueller writes that “a return to Marx’s critique of Proudhon will aid us in piercing through the Digital Proudhonist mystifications of the Internet’s effects on politics and industry and reformulate both a theory of cultural production under digital capitalism as well as radical politics of work and technology for the 21st century.”
- In “Mapping Without Tools: What the Digital Turn Can Learn from the Cartographic Turn.” Tim Duffy pushes back “against the valorization of ‘tools’ and ‘making’ in the digital turn, particularly its manifestation in digital humanities (DH), by reflecting on illustrative examples of the cartographic turn, which, from its roots in the sixteenth century through to J.B. Harley’s explosive provocation in 1989 (and beyond) has labored to understand the relationship between the practice of making maps and the experiences of looking at and using them. By considering the stubborn and defining spiritual roots of cartographic research and the way fantasies of empiricism helped to hide the more nefarious and oppressive applications of their work, I hope to provide a mirror for the state of the digital humanities, a field always under attack, always defining and defending itself, and always fluid in its goals and motions.”
- Joseph Erb, Joanna Hearne, and Mark Palmer with Durbin Feeling, in “Origin Stories in the Genealogy of Cherokee Language Technology,” argue that “the surge of critical work in digital technology and new media studies has rarely acknowledged the centrality of Indigeneity to our understanding of systems such as mobile technologies, major programs such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), digital aesthetic forms such as animation, or structural and infrastructural elements of hardware, circuitry, and code.”
- In “Artificial Saviors,” tante connects the pseudo-religious and pseudo-scientific rhetoric found at a surprising rate among digital technology developers and enthusiasts: “When AI morphed from idea or experiment to belief system, hackers, programmers, ‘data scientists,’ and software architects became the high priests of a religious movement that the public never identified and parsed as such.”
- In “The Endless Night of Wikipedia’s Notable Woman Problem,” Michelle Moravec “takes on one of the ‘tests’ used to determine whether content is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, notability, to explore how the purportedly neutral concept works against efforts to create entries about female historical figures.”
- In “The Computational Unconscious,” Jonathan Beller interrogates the “penetration of the digital, rendering early on the brutal and precise calculus of the dimensions of cargo-holds in slave ships and the sparse economic accounts of ship ledgers of the Middle Passage, double entry bookkeeping, the rationalization of production and wages in the assembly line, and more recently, cameras and modern computing.”
- In “What Indigenous Literature Can Bring to Electronic Archives,” Siobhan Senier asks, “How can the insights of the more ethnographically oriented Indigenous digital archives inform digital literary collections, and vice versa? How do questions of repatriation, reciprocity, and culturally sensitive contextualization change, if at all, when we consider Indigenous writing?”
- Rob Hunter provides the following abstract of “The Digital Turn and the Ethical Turn: Depoliticization in Digital Practice and Political Theory”:
  The digital turn is associated with considerable enthusiasm for the democratic or even emancipatory potential of networked computing. Free, libre, and open source (FLOSS) developers and maintainers frequently endorse the claim that the digital turn promotes democracy in the form of improved deliberation and equalized access to information, networks, and institutions. Interpreted in this way, democracy is an ethical practice rather than a form of struggle or contestation. I argue that this depoliticized conception of democracy draws on commitments—regarding personal autonomy, the ethics of intersubjectivity, and suspicion of mass politics—that are also present in recent strands of liberal political thought. Both the rhetorical strategies characteristic of FLOSS as well as the arguments for deliberative democracy advanced within contemporary political theory share similar contradictions and are vulnerable to similar critiques—above all in their pathologization of disagreement and conflict. I identify and examine the contradictions within FLOSS, particularly those between commitments to existing property relations and the championing of individual freedom. I conclude that, despite the real achievements of the FLOSS movement, its depoliticized conception of democracy is self-inhibiting and tends toward quietistic refusals to consider the merits of collective action or the necessity of social critique.
- John Pat Leary, in “Innovation and the Neoliberal Idioms of Development,” “explores the individualistic, market-based ideology of ‘innovation’ as it circulates from the English-speaking first world to the so-called third world, where it supplements, when it does not replace, what was once more exclusively called ‘development.’” He works “to define the ideology of ‘innovation’ that undergirds these projects, and to dissect the Anglo-American ego-ideal that it circulates. As an ideology, innovation is driven by a powerful belief, not only in technology and its benevolence, but in a vision of the innovator: the autonomous visionary whose creativity allows him to anticipate and shape capitalist markets.”
- Annemarie Perez, in “UndocuDreamers: Public Writing and the Digital Turn,” writes of a “paradox” she finds in her work with students who belong to communities targeted by recent immigration enforcement crackdowns and the default assumptions about “open” and “public” found in so much digital rhetoric: “My students should write in public. Part of what they are learning in Chicanx studies is about the importance of their voices, of their experiences and their stories are ones that should be told. Yet, given the risks in discussing migration and immigration through the use of public writing, I wonder how I as an instructor should either encourage or discourage students from writing their lives, their experiences as undocumented migrants, experiences which have touched, every aspect of their lives.”
- Gretchen Soderlund, in “Futures of Journalisms Past (or, Pasts of Journalism’s Future),” looks at discourses of “the future” in journalism from the 19^th and 20^th centuries, in order to help frame current discourses about journalism’s “digital future,” in part because when “when it comes to technological and economic speedup, journalism may be the canary in the mine.”
- In “The Singularity in the I790s: Toward a Prehistory of the Present With William Godwin and Thomas Malthus,” Anthony Galluzzo examines the often-misunderstood and misrepresented writings of William Godwin, and also those of Thomas Malthus, to demonstrate how far back in English-speaking political history go the roots of today’s technological Prometheanism, and how destructive it can be, especially for the political left.
“Digital Turn” Table of Contents
July 30, 2018
Drones

David Golumbia and David Simpson begin a conversation, inviting comment below or via email to boundary 2:

What are we talking about when we talk about drones? Is it that they carry weapons (true of only a small fraction of UAVs), that they have remote, mobile surveillance capabilities (true of most UAVs, but also of many devices not currently thought of as drones), or that they have or may someday have forms of operational autonomy (a goal of many forms of robotics research)? Is it the technology itself, or the fact that it is currently being deployed largely by the world’s dominant powers, or the way it is being deployed? Is it the use of drones in specific military contexts, or the existence of those military conflicts per se (that is, if we endorsed a particular conflict, would the use of drones in that scenario be acceptable)? Is it that military use of drones leads to civilian casualties, despite the fact that other military tactics almost certainly lead to many more casualties (the total number of all persons, combatant and non-combatant, killed by drones to date by US operations worldwide is estimated at under 4000; the number of civilian casualties in the Iraq conflict alone even by conservative estimates exceeds 100,000 and may be as many as 500,000 or even more), a reduction in total casualties that forms part of the arguments used by some military and international law analysts to suggest that drone use is not merely acceptable but actually required under international law, which mandates that militaries use the least amount of lethal force available to them that will effectively achieve their goals? If we object to drones based on their use in targeted killings, do we accept their use for surveillance? If we object only to their use in targeted killing, does that objection proceed from the fact that drones fly, or do we actually object to all forms of automated or partly-automated lethal force, along the lines of the Stop Killer Robots campaign, whose scope goes well beyond drones, and yet does not include non-lethal drones? How do we define drones so as to capture what is objectionable about them on humanitarian and civil society grounds, given how rapidly the technology is advancing and how difficult it already is to distinguish some drones from other forms of technology, especially for surveillance? What do we do about the proliferating “positive” use cases for drones (journalism, remote information about forest fires and other environmental problems, for example), which are clearly being developed in part so as to sell drone technology in general to the public, but at least in some cases appear to describe vital functions that other technology cannot fulfill?

–David Golumbia

_____

What resources can we call upon, invent or reinvent in order to bring effective critical attention to the phenomenon of drone warfare? Can we revivify the functions of witness and testimony to protest or to curtail the spread of robotic lethal violence? What alliances can be pursued with the radical journalism sector (Medea Benjamin, Jeremy Scahill)? Is drone warfare inevitably implicated in a seamlessly continuous surveillance culture wherein all information is or can be weaponized? A predictable development in the command-control-communication-intelligence syndrome articulated some time ago by Donna Haraway? Can we hope to devise any enforceable boundaries between positive and destructive uses of the technology? Does it bring with it a specific aesthetics, whether for those piloting the drones or those on the receiving end? What is the profile of psychological effects (disorders?) among those observing and then killing at a distance? And what are the political obligations of a Congress and a Presidency able to turn to drone technology as arguably the most efficient form yet devised for deploying state terrorism? What are the ethical obligations of a superpower (or indeed a local power) that can now wage war with absolutely no risk to its own combatants?

–David Simpson

September 29, 2014
The Digital Turn

David Golumbia and The b2 Review look to digital culture

~
I am pleased and honored to have been asked by the editors of boundary 2 to inaugurate a new section on digital culture for The b2 Review.

The editors asked me to write a couple of sentences for the print journal to indicate the direction the new section will take, which I’ve included here:

In the new section of the b2 Review, we’ll be bringing the same level of critical intelligence and insight—and some of the same voices—to the study of digital culture that boundary 2 has long brought to other areas of literary and cultural studies. Our main focus will be on scholarly books about digital technology and culture, but we will also branch out to articles, legal proceedings, videos, social media, digital humanities projects, and other emerging digital forms.

While some might think it late in the day for boundary 2 to be joining the game of digital cultural criticism, I take the time lag between the moment at which thoroughgoing digitization became an unavoidable reality (sometime during the 1990s) and the first of the major literary studies journals to dedicate part of itself to digital culture as indicative of a welcome and necessary caution with regard to the breathless enthusiasm of digital utopianism. As humanists our primary intellectual commitment is to the deeply embedded texts, figures, and themes that constitute human culture, and precisely the intensity and thoroughgoing nature of the putative digital revolution must give somebody pause—and if not humanists, who?

Today, the most overt mark of the digital in humanities scholarship goes by the name Digital Humanities, but it remains notable how little interaction there is between the rest of literary studies and that which comes under the DH rubric. That lack of interaction goes in both directions: DH scholars rarely cite or engage directly with the work the rest of us do, and the rest of literary studies rarely cites DH work, especially when DH is taken in its “narrow” or most heavily quantitative form. The enterprises seem, at times, to be entirely at odds, and the rhetoric of the digital enthusiasts who populate DH does little to forestall this impression. Indeed, my own membership in the field of DH has long been a vexed question, despite being one of the first English professors in the country to be hired to a position for which the primary specialization was explicitly indicated as Digital Humanities (at the University of Virginia in 2003), and despite being a humanist whose primary area is “digital studies,” and the inability of scholars “to be” or “not to be” members of a field in which they work is one of the several ways that DH does not resemble other developments in the always-changing world of literary studies.

Earlier this month, along with my colleague Jennifer Rhee, I organized a symposium called Critical Approaches to Digital Humanities sponsored by the MATX PhD program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where Prof. Rhee and I teach in the English Department. One of the conference participants, Fiona Barnett of Duke and HASTAC, prepared a Storify version of the Twitter activity at the symposium that provides some sense of the proceedings. While it followed on the heels and was continuous with panels such as the ‘Dark Side of the Digital Humanities’ at the 2013 MLA Annual Convention, and several at recent American Studies Association Conventions, among others, this was to our knowledge the first standalone DH event that resembled other humanities conferences as they are conducted today. Issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability were primary; cultural representation and its relation to (or lack of relation to) identity politics was of primary concern; close reading of texts both likely and unlikely figured prominently; the presenters were diverse along several different axes. This arose not out of deliberate planning so much as organically from the speakers whose work spoke to the questions we wanted to raise.

I mention the symposium to draw attention to what I think it represents, and what the launching of a digital culture section by boundary 2 also represents: the considered turning of the great ship of humanistic study toward the digital. For too long enthusiasts alone have been able to stake out this territory and claim special and even exclusive insight with regard to the digital, following typical “hacker” or cyberlibertarian assertions about the irrelevance of any work that does not proceed directly out of knowledge of the computer. That such claims could even be taken seriously has, I think, produced a kind of stunned silence on the part of many humanists, because it is both so confrontational and so antithetical to the remit of the literary humanities from comparative philology to the New Criticism to deconstruction, feminism and queer theory. That the core of the literary humanities as represented by so august an institution as boundary 2 should turn its attention there both validates the sense of digital enthusiasts of the medium’s importance, but should also provoke them toward a responsibility toward the project and history of the humanities that, so far, many of them have treated with a disregard that at times might be characterized as cavalier.

-David Golumbia

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March 21, 2014