Tactics and terms

Everyone who discusses it will, it seems, at some point or another point to Matthew Kirschenbaum’s idea of digital humanities as a “tactical term.” There are many reasons this makes sense: as a tactical term, “digital humanities” can accommodate the various kinds of research that occur under its auspices, can prevent having to make claim of superiority or primacy as a method/field, and can suggest in its own terms the way it functions in the academy.
In fact, it’s tremendously useful to think of “digital humanities” as a tactical term. The only problem I really have is that “tactical term” is a tactical term.
Near the end of his essay, Kirschenbaum writes that his essay is not intended as a provocation (426). While I’ve no doubt that it could be read as such, I’d like to pull a similar move and say, from the outset, I don’t mean this post as a provocation.
In fact, I’m completely serious that his idea of digital humanities as a tactical term is useful, as is his reminder that “DH is a means and not an end” (427). That also draws the strongest parallel between “digital humanities” and “humanities,” I think, insofar as no one in my experience has ever claimed to study literature simply for the sake of liking to study literature [1]. Everyone I’ve spoken with claims to study literature because it provides historical knowledge, gives them practice thinking about certain kinds of things, has liberatory potential, etc.
I identify these three to be fair, because they’re the reasons I usually give. My point isn’t to undermine people’s reasons or suggest that there’s something “deeper” going on. Rather, my point is that digital humanities – ironically, given the evident distaste of many participants for what’s lumped under “high theory” – is often the one area that can exceed “high theory” in its ability to navel-gaze.
At the same time, articles like Kirschenbaum identify why that’s the case in a way that’s unusual. Before coming to UB, I spoke with a current member of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis (etc.), who laughingly identified it as an empty signifier – a place around which certain constellations of research developed and found form, but one that doesn’t necessarily dictate the form.
I think, in part, it’s what Kirschenbaum so aptly identifies. By “tactical term,” after all, he means that most attempts to arrive at a definition are self-defeating because they risk excluding significant parts of DH and/or eliding the term’s history (415).
(As a side note, and perhaps because of my own sympathies with things that would indeed fall under “theory,” I’m more than a little surprised that, given the overlaps of definition and the core elements comprising it, no one in these essays seems to have made much of the Wittgensteinian idea of family resemblances.)
What he identifies implicitly that I find most useful, I think ,is the idea that although there will be DH centers, etc., long into the future (as he points out, there are serious infrastructural and terminological investments at this point), what they actually are may change heavily in a way that really won’t limit either them as digital humanities or elide their significance in the long run – perhaps, that is, people should continue to focus on doing things and let the results determine direction.

[1]. Actually, I can think of someone, but he’s well-adjusted to the point of perversity.

Maps and Texts and Data (oh, my!)

Matthew Wilken’s generally very good “Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method” is an interesting reading, not the least because he (to my reading) demonstrates the difficulty of intersection between “critique” and “composition,” in a loosely Latourian way. Or, to put it differently, his contribution is much better than his argument indicates.

As an overall project, the sort of distant reading and large-scale data interpretation he suggests are very interesting and (I think) enlightening. In part, my taste for this article has something to do with my interest in American literature and (particularly) regionalisms, so his examination of place-clusters on 252-253 seem very cool, as does the preoccupation his analysis suggests with international and foreign travel – “pretty diversely outward looking in a way that hasn’t yet received much attention,” as he puts it on 25.
I would quibble with some of his analysis, I think: I’m not sure what he would consider to be “much” attention, in the above passage, given the last few decades of research on American travel/tourism and transnational and literatures of encounters that are at the fore in many areas he’s referring to, or (for that matter) his apparent suggestion that attention to areas outside the U.S. contradicts what he refers to as the “standard model of the period,” that “its fiction is strongly introspective at both the personal and national levels, concerned largely with American identity and belonging” (252-53) – a model that, even where still accepted, bases itself precisely in the amount of anxiety expressed about what it meant to be an American abroad or confronted with those outside areas.
Even with that, however, I think he’s right in looking for broader patterns in these kinds of texts, the kind that become available through data mining. If, after all, the point is to look for patterns in these texts, then I agree that being able to actually do so in a way that can look for increasingly complicated patterns in increasingly large bodies of texts makes sense.
It’s this justification, though, that worries me. I appreciate the candor of his opening: “canons exist, and we should do something about them. The digital humanities offer a potential solution to this problem, but only if we are willing to reconsider our priorities for digital work in ways that emphasize quantitative methods and the large corpora on which they depend” (249). This move, it seems to me, misrepresents what the article does and, moreover, does a disservice to the real work of the article.

The misrepresentation occurs because of conflation, as a look at the opening moves suggest: he begins with the generally acceptable view that, despite the canon wars of 30 years ago, canons still exist. Immediately, however, he qualifies his claim: these are not canons “in the Arnoldian-Bloomian sense of the canon, a single list of great books,” but canons “in the more pluralist sense of books one really needs to have read to take part in the discipline” and the “books many of us teach in common to our own students” (249). It is these canons he takes aim at, canons that are just “adding a Morrison here and subtracting a Dryden there” (249).

Here, I have to separate (at least for my own enjoyment of the article) his project from his goals, because the move he claims as the impetus strikes me as, well, wrong. The problem is that the logical move he makes – “The idea of a Western canon (in, as he says, the Arnoldian sense of moralizing best ideas) was ethically and intellectually problematic; therefore, having canons (in the sense of books that are usually considered necessary to read for a field) is ethically problematical as well” – is not as obvious or unequivocal as he takes it to be. The problem he extrapolates from the second sense – what he refers to as a problem of abundance – was not the problem of the first sense. He writes of this overabundance that “[w]hat little we do read is deeply nonrepresentative of the full field of literary and cultural production” (251). Moreover, he notes, most of the texts we do read are “actively promoted by the major publishing houses and in any case almost exclusively books that have been vetted through commercial publication” (251).
Bluntly, the problem with the Canon (big “C”) was not that it was not sufficiently representational. The problem was that it was both prescriptive and exclusionary in a deliberative way. Even if one accedes completely that taste, aesthetics, etc. are implicated in socially constructed models of dominance by a controlling interest, it is not the same to say “these are different exemplifications of what we study” and “these are the only culturally permissible forms of aesthetic judgment, containing a natural virtue that must be emulated.” The Canon was problematic, essentially, because it didn’t permit the idea of canons – it was totalizing, an absolute on which one could found entire worldviews of taste.
This relationship hits at the heart of where I see his article going two directions. What the above-cited passages suggest are the competing impulses of critique and composition. The most interesting parts of the essay occur when he is generating information. The least interesting is when he situates it. The idea of looking for the place names in texts with an eye to figuring out the mental geographical ecologies of people producing texts is deeply interesting to me, as are the types of incremental change he suggests such data mining would allow us to look to. (I’m currently working with Heather on a somewhat similar project involving western expansion.) That is composition. His argument, however, that the point of doing so is to eliminate canons, or to make the study of literature “truly” representational, are critique: however unintentional, the overarching reasoning here is “there is a unified, compelling, ‘really real’ thing that is literature studies; if we get rid of human subjectivity, we can access it.” It’s not even that I disagree with what he seems to suggest that vision is (historicist cultural studies) or that there can be a correspondence with positivist science/data types without things (the irrational, the unconscious, etc.) getting lost. It’s that this argument doesn’t *need* these kinds of justifications, in my mind. The data he analyzes is perfectly interesting and perhaps even more so without claiming it as the answer to a “still existing” problem that he reinvokes.

Debugging Debates: Stallworth and Harraway on Critique and Theory

One of the things – in fact, the primary thing – that bothers me about Debates in Digital Humanities is the way in which it spends a major section on “Defining the Digital Humanities.” There is nothing wrong with this (except, perhaps, the intractability of the definition) per se; what I find troublesome is the organization of terms that ensues. If “digital humanities” isn’t ever defined, there are at least debates; the term “theory” is not so lucky. Rather, the treatment of “theory” mostly repeats the tired formulations of the non-digital humanities, which is to say, “theory” is a.) that which is/will be dead (interestingly, the verb choice doesn’t depend that much on when this is said; some of the “theory has run its course and is now dead” arguments go back at least to the 1960s, nearly as far back as people predicting that no one would need home computers as they were a triviality, sure to run their course) b.) is oppositional to creation (that is, it is reflection of things that are already created and as such, generates no new work) and c.) is a unified system.

I’ll admit that the tendency to view theory as a concrete entity is attractive. It also does, in fact, have several unified aspects (as an interpretive lens, for example) that allow it to be talked about as such, and it probably has been responsible for a great deal of wheel spinning.  Worse, I think “theory,” presented in this sense, frequently obscures other, potentially useful (hermeneutics, for instance) interpretations. It seems to me, though, that there are some implicit assumptions (for instance, “postmodernism” as a theory, rather than an indicative set of traits developing out of global capitalism) that make a view of theory as a unified entity.  Moreover, there are two primary problems, as I read it, that make such an equivalence unfair.

First, “theory,” as practiced in humanities departments, is shorthand for ways of interpreting literature and cultural artifacts. The problem there is that the kind of work that goes on (“I’m going to do a Marxist/Derridean/New Historicist reading of this work!”)  often misses the point, the point where the theory originated. Each of those critical apparatuses is derived not from a theory about literature, exactly, but from a way of thinking of how the world works.  A Marxian worldview derives not from the desire to read certain books in certain ways but from a belief in something of how the economics influence things: it is an economic and social theory that has something to say about books, in the same way that Lacanian theory is a psychology that has fundamental claims about how the mind works and Derridean deconstruction has certain claims about how the world exists. It is the case in all of them that they can speak to texts; equally, though, I think texts speak to them. Thus while there is a certain truth to the belief that a Marxist will always produce a Marxist critique, any assumed negativity in that statement comes from the point of view that applying theory is somehow intended to teach more about books – not that books can and do inform theory.  The application of Sartre’s method from _Critique_ will yield vastly different results than, say, applying the thoughts of Negri and Hardt, but in either case, I don’t think that the point of the authors is to give grad students a way to graduate.

Second, and more fundamentally, “theory” seems to take the role of a fall guy. As people have been usefully pointing out in seminar, the idea of doing things without reflecting on them is a fundamentally scary one. It may be the case that humanities-style work occurs with or without the involvement of humanists (e.g., designing programs that sift through calls in order to label terrorists). I would assert, though, the proper role of a humanist would be in destroying the impetus behind such a program (even refusing to participate in a society that espouses such practices as a basic condition of continuation) rather than involvement. But even more than that: it makes sense to me that many of today’s professors are steeped in the “theory wars,” and may reject “theory” as a blanket, destructive term. But what is then obscured is that any methodology, if that’s the preferred alternative, still depends on a theory, a worldview of some sort. I’m not trying to be glib. What I mean is that, broadly conceived, “theory” can also equate to “worldview,” and in the sense that even the decision to look at a book in the first place represents some action undertaken as part of a set of beliefs. “Humanism” is itself a theory in a broad sense.

By saying that theory is a fallguy, though, I don’t just mean it’s a dirty word. I mean that it is viewed as something apart from (and generally oppositional to) creation: one either creates or theorizes. One produces, or one feeds scavenger-like on the corpses of others’ creations. One either does or one thinks. Laid bare, I think it looks as unfair to those traditionally classed as “creators” – who would protest, I suspect, that they *do* think – as it does to those engaged in critical work. And, again, I think that the reasons for this become most clear in the separation between theory and worldview that are often promoted: one has to demonstrate an understanding of “theory” and its applications to pass lit. crit classes; there’s no comparable test on worldviews available (though, as a thought experiment, I like to envision economics departments – themselves just as much an ideological creation as English departments – who are told that recourse to the theories of Keynes, or Marx, or Friedman is disallowed as “theory is dead”).

But the strongest argument comes, I think, from inside. This week in The New Media Reader (a text for my DH course), we read among other things Harraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” and Stall’s “GNU Manifesto.” I’m not prepared, I think, to write about Harraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” as it’s too fundamental to a lot of what I’ve been working with for the past few years and this is the first time I’ve read it. But between it and Stallman’s “The GNU Manifesto,” I think there’s a powerful look at the potential for critique and composition of the type Bianco offers. Harraway’s position comes more obviously from what we would think of as “theory,” in the sense of feminist theory, but both are essentially critiques and calls for action. In a sense, the GNU system of distribution, etc., is the manifesto translated into action: without that kind of promulgation of values (which, I should note, intersects strongly with certain liberal capitalist theories of market systems), the system could not have existed as it does. In the sense of a network, a piece like his (or Harraway’s) forms a point, an object of sorts, that alters the stream of thought around it, allowing for new potentials and influencing new lines of thought. If it’s true that critiquing can replace activity, it’s also the case perhaps that it can motivate change, that the claim that not everything is as it should be can lead to attempts to fix it.

Some thoughts on what to ask and how

Johanna Drucker’s “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship” is, to me, one of the more exciting pieces that we’ve read in my digital humanities course so far. I’m not saying that I agree with all (I’m not even sure about “most”) of what she writes, but I think that the questions she asks are valuable and, in some senses, on a different vein than a great deal of the conversation surrounding DH that I’ve encountered so far.

Drucker’s first guiding question seems to fall within the ordinary purview of many DH conversations: are, she asks, “humanitists actually doing anything different or just extending the activiites that have always been their core concerns, enabled by advantages of networked digital technology (easier access to primary materials, speed of comparison, searching, etc.)?” (85). This is a question, it seems to me, of compartmentalization in the same sense that asking whether a “speculative turn” in philosophy can be referred to as a cohesive movement: while it has certain values (that I don’t mean to underrepresent) in terms of how we think of things, it mostly asks us to look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not (as it were).

Her second question, she writes, “frames a very different agenda: Have the humanities had any impact on the digital environment? Can we create graphical interfaces and digital platforms from humanistic methods?” (85).

Obviously, the second question does not differ in some respects from the first: it’s a question that begs for definitions. Some of these, I think, she handles well: she implies, for example, that of primary importance to the thought of humanities are “the role of affect, notions of non—self-identiticality of all expressions, the force of a constructivist approach to knowledge as knowing, observer dependent, emergent, and process driven” (87). Some of these she does less well: her final example, of the difference in ideas of time and temporality between humanists (who look at time as often “in relativistic terms as in absolute ones” (93)) and scientific researchers (as “imagined by researchers checking the frequency of urination in lab rats or number of commuters […] during certain hours” (93)) falls apart when one remembers that not all scientific researchers spend their days monitoring urination or counting commuters, somewhat in the same way that not all humanities researchers spend their time parsing what bird metaphors meant about where Shakespeare spent most of his time.[1]

The question, for me, gains value exactly in the moments when it assumes the application of a set of humanistic methods, theories, etc., against some forms of practice and representation. What is interesting is the way in which such an application seems to be a road test of what is done, something that (sort of correlatively to what Heather posted below) forces us to make sense of what it is we’re doing when we do humanities, the challenge of application. It may be the case, as she seems to argue, that computers reify models in ways to make them seem authoritiative and conducive to misunderstanding (here, though, I’m thinking of a student I had who, after reading a basic description of Freudian theory, turned in a draft of a paper detailing the various analogues one can find between the gun in Jewett’s “A White Heron” and a penis in form, function, and use – a paper unburdened, I should add, by any internal censorship or even sense of propriety as well as indicating a rich descriptive vocabulary). It may even be the case that if you “put the average person in front [of Google Maps] and they believe they are seeing the world, not a constructed version of it” (91; italics in original) – which we could no doubt usefully differentiate from putting this same average person in front of _Of Grammatology_ and seeing the degree to which they understand its workings, or (more directly) asking an average person why they’re uncomfortable starting a sentence with a coordinating conjunction…

My point, however, is that I think the kinds of questions she’s asking here are very useful insofar as they force a reflection on what it is we actually do to begin with. The question ‘do we need another deconstructive reading of a text?” (specific readings, I suspect, not being as hard a thing to make a computer do as I might hope they are for the sake of job security), we can ask “why would we need such a reading, or a thousand of them” – paradoxically, then, I think one of the things Drucker most usefully identifies is the way in which digital humanities gives a space from which to take stock of what it is we are already doing.

 

[1] I mean this absolutely: if there is one thing I dislike about her piece, it’s the leveling work of “humanities versus science” in it. I realize it’s only one example – though, in a longer post, I think it would be possible to show across the board – but her discussion on temporality reveals it very clearly. If I were to tell my friends who do research in medicine, structural geology, and theoretical astrophysics that they had a view of time that didn’t take into account its experience as perceived (cf. 93), they would all take issue for different reasons. I realize she’s most likely discussing this within the terms of “humanities representation versus modes of representation conventionally available within digital humanities,” but there’s still the question (raised, in particular, by her – I think playful – mention of the possibility of different potential event horizons) of whether that sort of leveling is productive.

Marshall, My Grotesque Little Technologizer, You Simply MUST Meet Sherwood

As usual for my D.H. course, we read a rather disparate group of readings, from Marshall McLuhan to Gilles Deleuze to Raymond Williams. The McLuhan essay began with a discussion of the grotesque,  a concept that I’ve never thought about in any meaningful way. This week in the 20th C. Am. Novels seminar, though, we were discussing Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which begins with a story called “The Book of the Groteque.” (I don’t have my copy so I’m going from a Nook edition and not paginating.)  Anderson describes an old writer who had a thought, a thought that “was involved but a simple statement of it would be something like this: That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.” The “grotesques,” for the old man, are what were created when people (some of whom were “quite strong” and “snatched up a dozen”) created their lives around the truths:
“ It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”Within the structure of the book, there are a lot of interesting things about this passage, but what really interested me in reading the McLuhan (whom, I should add, I’ve never read before and have recently developed an interest in after reading some of the ways his work is being applied, especially in some things by Harman). McLuhan, in “The Galaxy Reconfigured” (1962) traces a fascinating history of usage of the “grotesque,” from Ruskin’s idea of it as “the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character” (qtd. in McLuhan 195) to Joyce’s acceptance of the grotesque as a mode of broken or syncopated manipulation to permit inclusive or simultaneous perception of a total and diversified field,” which McLuhan identifies as “symbolism by definition – a collocation, a parataxis of components representing insight by carefully established ratios, but without a point of view or lineal connection or sequential order” (195-96; italics in original).

Maybe appropriately, McLuhan uses this approach to dramatize the distinction between the singular perspective and multiple, the way in which Joyce changes the rhetorical figures of Quintillan (which McLuhan refers to as “archetypes or postures of individual minds” (196)) into symbols, which are (perhaps because of definitional necessity) shared: “archetypes or postures of individual minds” (196).
McLuhan’s move, analyzing this use of individual archetypes being used as symbols and thus shattering the single perspective, is fascinating in its own way, but what I’m more interested in is the way in which this idea, which seems so different at first glance from Anderson’s, says about interconnection. The third source that came to mind in reading this was a CNN editorial I read this morning called “Google knows too much about you”. In it, Frida Ghitis raises some real concerns about Google’s new privacy policy, but what caught my attention were the embedded article links to articles by Rebecca Mackinnon from January 29 (“We’re losing control of our digital privacy”) and, particularly, Andrew Keen’s February 3rd opinion piece “We must avoid Facebook’s ‘creepy’ cult of transparency”. (aside: can anyone think of a piece decrying collectivization that does not refer to “we”?)
The idea that we should have a right to dictate how information we generate through our searches and data entries are, I think, sound: despite protestations that we should simply “be careful” what we post, the computational abilities of a company like Google or Facebook, when they have the ability to cross reference our emails and searches, makes the idea of an equal relationship unrealistic. I think these authors are absolutely right in expressing concern with the unregulated control we accept (largely by implied consent) when we use them.

What interests me, though, in line with the use of the “grotesque,” is the idea Keen expresses that “That data is us.” Prima facie, this makes sense: in the sense of verifiable data, with the right algorithm and sufficient processing power, it would be possible to create very accurate representation of several aspects of a person’s identity.

But the idea of “data” being an “I,” in the sense of egoic identity, misses something vital. It is, I think, the grotesque, running along some line between Anderson’s use and MacLuhan’s tracing out of the concept, a line that, on further exploration, turns out to be a continuum: the point for Anderson, as I read him, is that accepting one or even several truths as somehow fundamental to the working of life and basing life around them, is what flattens people into grotesques, distorted, caricature-like figures, crude cave drawings of humans. Similarly, the idea of reducing people to a metric of information misses the point of composition – and, paradoxically, even as people of objects, taken in a specific sense.

Objects have parts, it’s true. One can even describe an object by its parts. But an object, to borrow from Harman’s The Prince of Networks, “is real not by virtue of being tiny and fundamental, but by virtue of having an intrinsic reality that is not reducible to its subcomponents or exhausted by its functional effects on other things” (215). Put another way, there are things that people can do (or even, I would argue, not do but have the potential for doing) that the data sets describing them cannot. The data sets – what books I’m likely to buy on Amazon, or whether my frequent searches for kitchen tools indicates my socioeconomic strata – are real in their own right, and descriptors of certain things. Nevertheless, they remain only sensual objects, existing (again in Harman’s terms) only “on the interior of some other object,” existing solely as exterior states (215).

This is not, of course, the only way to pursue it: we could think instead of the Deleuzian assemblages from the last selection in this section, which comprise “lines and measurable speeds” (407). What is missing in either case is the idea of mediation as an activity that, here, is a creative tool. Even an exact detailing of every activity from every part of life, a “universal biography” to rival Borges’ Universal Library, would still not have an exact identity: it would be an abstracted description, in some sense, mediated into whatever forms of measurement would be universalizable in this instance.

I don’t want to suggest that these privacy concerns aren’t real: they are. And we should be angry over some of the things being done, I think, and take action. But I think we should also be concerned about the widespread view of mediated data sets being “us,” the idea of being reducible into these sets. Again, I don’t even mean this in the sense of some sort of qualia. Instead, I think it’s a question (to use a properly DH term) of interface: leaving behind an arboreal model of knowledge – and thus, I think, of self – and adopting even momentarily a more rhizomatic model, we would have to ask the same questions of such a data set – and of a human identity– that Deleuze and Guattari ask of books: ”what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge” (407). This, I think, has profound implications – not the least for whether I really am reducible to my Amazon addiction in any but the singular sense of interacting with Amazon and my increasingly frustrated banker.

Vannevar Bush, Digital Thinking, and A Terminator Reference (Oh Boy!)

“Can an object say to its maker, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” – Paul, c. 50-55 c.e.

“[The writer,] while he is writing on good subjects, is by the very act of writing introduced in a certain measure into the knowledge of the mysteries and greatly illuminated in his innermost soul; for those things which we write we more firmly impress upon the mind…While he is ruminating on the Scriptures he is frequently inflamed by them. […] He who ceases from zeal for writing because of printing is no true lover of the Scriptures.” – Johannes Trimethius, c. 1494 c.e.

I’m ambivalent about some of this week’s readings in my digital humanities course for reason of having read largely science fiction as an adolescent. While I agree, for example, with another student’s comment regarding what I’ll refer to (for the sake of convenience) the overall coolness of Vannevar Bush’s idea for what is essentially a desktop computer (in 1945! In Atlantic Monthly!), I’m a little leery of attributing predictive power even to someone so obviously in touch with the progress of technology during his time.

My big question is about causality. Did the chicken come from the egg, or did the chicken think, “hey, you know what would be a cool way to reproduce and make a delicious if high-cholesterol breakfast?” Well, maybe not in those terms, and no, I’m not suggesting teleological evolution – I’ve read just enough Gould for that. I’m not even suggesting the more prima facie reading of my own terms, that the fact someone with the sheer determining power that can come with Bush’s status could cause changes in computing development by writing an article like that (though that’s closer to my sense). Rather, I’m suggesting that way we discuss causality in technological developments may be backward.

I hear you already: “But Dan, a.) Bush was a brilliant scientist, b.) nearly all of the technologies he suggested have come to pass (voice recognition and transcription, desktop… or desk-in computing, as the case may be, photography that doesn’t require a development process and can be fitted to someone’s head who isn’t afraid of looking rather goofy, etc.), and c.) he repeatedly acknowledged his own event horizon.”

To which I respond, “Yes. But he’s not here, and I am. Because I love you. So don’t interrupt.”

What I mean, briefly, is that I think there is a tendency to consider technology an object that we create, one which may have the potential for changing our way of life but essentially originating in human development. Think of the Terminator movies. Ignoring that the whole premise was bastardized by the continuity error of the second (explain it away all you want; a big part of what made it cool in the first one was that only organic material could travel through time, unlike the liquid metal guy in the second, and thus weapons couldn’t come through), the premise of the films revolved around the invention of skynet* because of a single technological breakthrough that had to be destroyed.

Here’s the problem with that scenario: that’s not, generally, how breakthroughs occur. We discuss the idea of digital humanities as a collaborative effort and as computers as promoting connectivity as a whole, but our language and thought processes still revolve around the idea of Cartesian subjects connecting to others through various mediating influences. As Alex [Reid] asked, how could we deal with the idea of humanities papers coauthored by ten, or twenty, or ten thousand people? (the Bureau of Labor gives the number of postsecondary teachers of English and literature in the U.S. at around 75,000). To extend that: how do we separate the thoughts of ten thousand people whose work comes to the same conclusion from the standpoint of ideas as discrete entities?

Or, to take it one step further in that direction, how do we account for the parallel evolution of technologies? Bush dwells on the technological labor intensity required to produce machines, noting (for example) that Babbage, even with a great deal of support, “could not produce his great arithmetical machine,” and, further, “[h]ad a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a  single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza” (38). (Ed. aside: take THAT, Hank Morgan!). From a different angle: Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filed for patents for the first telephone (independently, it’s believed) on the same day. Galileo was one of four people to “discover” sunspots during the same year. Some people talk of “Moore’s Law,” a rule governing technological development at a level that virtually ignores the human actors – in a reductive way, humanity (viewed as a whole, rather than a collection of ego-I’s) develops things in ways that could be mathematically modeled and predicted.

Regardless of what one thinks of this law (I’m pretty skeptical), what I’m driving at in these examples is the idea that even J.C.R. Licklider didn’t go quite far enough in his “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960), that his division between machines as, more or less, prostheses versus machines as symbiotic entities was pretty much outmoded when humans began to live in England during the winter months. Humans are not the only species to use tools, it’s true: some species of primates and dolphins have been known to use things in tool capacities. But humans, at least in our age and at our numbers, are dependent on these technologies in ways that other species generally are not on those they create. Moreover, following Sartre’s idea of labor in CDR, I would argue that humans are shaped by their tools in  ways more immediate than animals are. In Sartre, the concept is referred to as the “practico-inert” (the best post I’ve ever seen about the concept refers to it as “antipraxis, which I don’t find in Sartre but may be a more useful way of conceptualizing it). Basically, when we work on something, we infuse it with our labor/some element of ourselves, and this worked matter gains a life of its own. On the one hand, our labor-investment in the object allows it to repeat that same labor over and over, extending in incredible ways the potential labor available for new projects: It may take a long time to create all of the things that allow us to build a robot that makes cars, but these robots will keep making cars, with a certain amount of maintenance, thus replicating that labor without an apparent diminishing return on the labor infused.

The second aspect of this, however, is that some element of this praxis (see why that other term is handy?) with which the machine (or whatever) is infused gives it a life of its own. In Sartre’s terms, we create finalities in these machines, which then become finalities of their own, which form counter-finalities that act against (generally) or independently (my thought – Sartre is still, after all, fairly anthropocentric) of our activities. Sartre gives the example of the years of farming and clearcutting in China that have paved the way for lethal mudslides as a rather negative example, but I think we could also envision it as roads determining destinations (Deleuze), washing machines determining hygiene (Bryant), etc.

Bryant makes the (very insightful, it seems to me) observation that the goals developed from new technology are posited for us, rather than being enunciated or set by us (really, you should read the entry). What I would suggest, in line with what I’ve been trying to hit at in general, is that this is no less true of how we consider ourselves (in any sense). If we investigate the use of the “I” in “I didn’t set this goal; I was given this goal by the emergence of technological webs,” what I think we find is that there is a disconcerting effect on what we could mean. Do we mean, for example, that “I” as a body and mind duality, “I” as a Wittgenstein idea of the subject of the predicate, “I” as a transcendental soul? If we consider it in the psychophysical sense of Husserl, a point of observation embedded or inscribed in a body extending to those things where we can experience senses, then there are going to be rather profound implications for how we consider the surplus of kidney that we generally can’t feel – and what qualia are we implicitly postulating in differentiating the user seeing words on a screen versus seeing an “object” in life?

Moreover, the idea that “symbiosis” is contingent, as seems to be the suggestion, on dependence raises a similar concern. I volunteered for a while on an ambulance in a predominately agricultural area, and in brief: yes, people still consider themselves an “I” and can function with some parts removed, yet they do not seem (though I admittedly did not think to ask) to regard those parts, even once gone, as having been extraneous technologies.

Which brings me back to the Pharaoh and his car. The problem is not that they couldn’t have made the metals or equipments (though that is, perhaps, true). The problem is, I think, that we think that there is a linear direction of technology, time, and production. We envision people thinking up new things, perhaps as enabled by the technology of their times, and moving forward, contributing in a way that implies some teleology to the technological landscape, when I think that the distributive function of intelligence and creation might suggest, instead, that what is at stake are the terms by which we define finitude and the possibility of its existence in a meaningful way into the future.

*a real name, evidently, not only for a UK military communications satellite system but also for a Belgian multimedia company whose marketing firm, I submit, should rethink things