boundary 2

Tag: language

  • David Golumbia — The Digital Turn

    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 19th and 20th 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

     

     

     

  • Thinking the Permissible, or Speaking in Common

    Thinking the Permissible, or Speaking in Common

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    In this paper written for the MLA roundtable “Toward an Academic Commons: Academic Freedom and Sites of Contested Speech,” Colin Dayan reflects on what happens when academic freedom is cornered and subsumed by the demands of “civility” and “rationality.”

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    And these are knaves that brawl for better laws
    And cant of tyranny in stronger powers
    Who glut their vile unsatiated maws
    And freedoms birthright from the weak devour

    –John Clare, “To a Fallen Elm”

    Who gets to speak? “To speak,” Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks is to exist for the other. “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.” To acquire a “civilizing language,” then, is to be an exile in your own land, however we define the terrain of personal significance and conviction.

    The “academic commons,” is something of an oxymoron, a paradox as heady as St. Paul’s encounter with the vexation of bodily resurrection. Must not a new definition of the body be coined? The crux of the matter lies in the spirit that is also the flesh, in something quite intangible, even insensate, but persistent and always quite thing-like.

    The call to the commons, to a “common ground,” or, as some would endorse “the common interests,” is to revel in what we as teachers and students share “in common.” But who is to say what the ground of the common, the commonplace or commonality is? As Morrison wrote in Beloved, “definitions are always in the hands of the definers.” To hold ideas in common is much like the call for consensus: whoever calls for this fellowship has a pretty good idea of what is or is not to be accepted or permissible as shared values. Or to put it more bluntly, these values are akin to holding certain “truths to be self-evident.” As Justice Taney made explicit in his opinion in Dred Scott: “we the people” was never meant to include that class of persons who carried the “indelible mark” of “degradation”:

    The men who framed this declaration were great men — high in literary acquirements, high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and how it would be understood by others, and they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery.

    Which people, or persons, or members of the global Academy are excluded from the commons? Zones of exclusion mark off indelibly the lives that are cordoned off, trapped, demolished, bulldozed, expropriated, uprooted, by-passed.

    But for some of our colleagues, those of us who would bring these lives to light are guilty of “partisan politics,” “purges,” and “censorship,” even though there is absolutely no evidence of such practice or intent. Politics is never separate from scholarship. Thought, imagination, and learning is always enhanced by collision and conflict. In “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Theodore Adorno wrote, and I paraphrase, any poet who claims not to be political is in fact proclaiming a politics—and I would add—silencing others in a far more devious because subtle way.

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    Why should I speak? I’ve always been haunted by Gramsci’s warning that we are all “experts in legitimation” and by the savvy insight of Bourdieu and Passeron in Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture published in 1977, that we – no matter what we intend—can never shed that ermine robe of authority. An authority honed to say what needs to be taught and thought in the right, the tasteful, the distinctive and recognizable—the civil—way.

    But there is always a politics to the under-read and the critical background against which such silences are made. William Carlos Williams recognized the silencing generated by experts, the careening authority of the estimable critics. Before the formidable and raging Book 3 of Paterson, against the background of a library burning and books in flames, he scorned the “knowledgeable idiots, the university,/…../The outward masks of the special interests/that perpetuate the stasis and make it profitable.”
    He recognized how inextricable is the language, the craft, the tools of scholarship from the casual disregard, the everyday violence in the “corrupt cities.” So it was not artlessness that he wanted but something else, something he called “the foulness”—the kind of writing that threatened the moneyed and the privileged, the extensions of state-sanctioned racism and its sanguine exclusivity.

    The affront to the reasonable, the necessary, and the secure matters now more than ever. Reasonable consensus and civility: these words engage me, unsettled as I am by the prospect of divisions (not only of subject but also genre) that allow the continued dispossession of those creatures – human and non-human alike–who remain outside the circle of grace, delivered to subjection without recourse. How can we shed the mantle of civility, consensus, and rationality just long enough to question the claims of decency?

    How do we speak? When it comes to matters of civility and befouling, we need to question our role as teachers and scholars, as well the threats to our profession by a silencing that is racially driven though culturally masked. The remedy of culture always excuses or conceals the experience of racism. In this time of terror, in our complicity with “kill lists,” drone strikes, global dispossession, mass incarceration, and murders of black citizens on our streets, what are the choices offered us as academics?

    A cure for all kinds of threats, reasonableness has long been a way to extend persecution, civil death, and torture. But this rationality, like the theory that accompanies it, is tied to figurative power, and its metaphors can at any time become more insistent. What the anthropologist and historian, the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot, called the “explanatory power of culture” allowed the contexts for inequality and racism to continue. Indeed, they became harsher because hidden by the call for a common ground.

    Our embrace of the “commons” or “academic commons,” though well-intentioned, risks enabling the false ideal of “consensus” that always rears its ugly, if “reasonable” head just when social and racial stratification is at its worst. Against the fashionable cartography of the commons, or a search for common ground, stands the language of stigma, incarceration, control—and downright extermination. Should we not reclaim the singularity of lives that do not span borders, or more precisely, who never —at least not in this country—gained the right to have rights in common?

    Matters of terminology delimit privilege, just as they silence the disenfranchised, the invisible ones, who are always quite visible though objects of serene disregard. Our thought should be supple and ever watchful for the terms that perpetuate the very contexts of inequality—and specifically, racism. I’m grappling here with the push-and-pull of the call for the commons, always moderated and even reproduced by the humanitarian concern that is analogous to it, and hence always already closed to criticism. I learned from Trouillot—may he rest in peace—how the most benign of academic trends carried with it a strategy of extermination that always targets people of color, the poor or the powerless. He knew its eugenic violence even as he confronted its universalizing promise, what he called “totalitarian humanism” and the bugbears of academia: civility and compromise.

    * * * * * * * * *

    Retaliation hides behind a logic that is at once exclusionary and authoritarian. This policing of thought indulges in all manner of intolerant behavior. In the context of the de-hiring of a scholar like Salaita, we have sought in our conscience how to respond to coercion and threat found in the least likely of places—the university’s so-called “ivory tower.”

    Sickened by the civility-mongers’ pieties and the costs to scholars who dare to think hard and feel passionately, I recall Poe’s disdain for the oracles of “higher morality.” These “thinkers-that-they-think” used “civility”–and all such words for self-righteous sentiment–to destroy literary careers and exclude anyone who threatened the status quo. Such entrenched proclivities for what Poe condemned as “doggerel aesthetics” masked the ugly money-fundament to such cunning ideality. What has happened to Steven Salaita matters to us all, no matter our views or our assumed status in the groves of academe. The resilience of genuine academic freedom is that it ensures that these abuses, and the watchdog groups and alumni that abet them, are no longer hidden from the eyes of the world, immune to the prescriptive force of morality, beyond the judgment of society, masked by the appeal to “civility.”

  • The Tunisian revolution three years on

    Djebel Rassas

    Mohamed-Salah Omri takes stock of Tunisian language, and thus Tunisian cultural production and political sentiment, three years into the revolution: “The revolution in Tunisia was in many important ways a revolution in language.” Read full article here.

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    cover photo: the peaks of Djebel Rassas, southeast Tunis, Tunisia