the humanities is dead (or it soon will be); or, who's your outside?

The project of the humanities as outlined this morning seems to be about information—especially about the space to store it in. This strikes me as the library science project at its most basic. Indeed, if the word “humanist” was replaced with the word “librarian,” the presentations would have been completely coherent to a library science audience. All the dense knots of power in what gets stored, organized, and how are present in both visions. For example, digitizing already very familiar cultural documents like the JFK assassination footage and the Beatles on Ed Sullivan demonstrates a particular set of cultural values through both presence and absence. Library science shares this problem, though I think it perhaps is a bit unfair to equate digitization with organization and access. Let’s not forget generations of archivists and librarians with their pencils and index cards working with limited funds and less than ideal conditions to catalog and keep this material in the first place, even though it is feminized and not very glamorous labor. So I’m wondering about what kind of truck humanities scholars actually have with information. I think of information as one step up the food chain from data; and I think the work of scholars is somewhere at the level of knowledge and theory—theory being something that can predict and produce knowledge from other knowledge, and from data and information. We can be information rich and still knowledge poor. (I’m prepared to revisit my epistemological hierarchy in conversations that take my contentions seriously.) I am still seeing “big humanities” as a call to scholars outside the funded sciences to use and design technologies but mostly still for commercial agendas, including those that dictate scientific agendas. (Thankfully this afternoon we’ve seen some examples of small humanities that are in critical tension with the technologies they use, and with vocabularies that include the terms “politics,” “power,” “ideologies,” and “master narratives” that are basic to any critical vocabulary but remarkably absent from the seminar’s collective lexicon.) There are many in the humanities who are rightly gun-shy about big, meta projects, partly because humanism as been complicit in the sorts of violence that come under the banner of positivism; the technodeterminism that is all too evident in the mood of the seminar is a subspecies of this positivism. Positivism is a word I’m not afraid to use. I think we can still recall Herman Gray and George Lewis last week reminding us that cultural memory is power laden and that science has a racist history and present. So here we can ask yet again what it is to just put everything in a big storage device, and what will constitute that “everything.” And we can take the insights of very savvy (slow down for the next word) scientist-critics including Donna Haraway (biology) and Karen Barad (theoretical physics) and not see the violence in scientific knowledge production as outside aberrations, but part and parcel of science as a socially situated operation. The point is powerfully made that this is not a call to stop doing science but to see the context of scientific knowledge making as part of science itself. This is what Barad’s insistence on materiality is about. Her intra-action questions in Bohrian fashion where the experimental apparatus stops and starts. Neither Haraway nor Barad have dispensed with objectivity, but they have made it clear that we can no longer have the illusion of a pure, untainted science. Part of this is an optimism that whatever jam humans get into can be gotten out of through the application of scientific method (narrowly defined). And neither Haraway nor Barad would issue the material without the semiotic. They are both in deep conversation with poststructuralism. In one scientifistic mode, the social and the scientific are entirely separate, and the work of social science and the humanities is to supplement the scientific work to keep the scientists from going awry and designing any more Tuskegee experiments and to help some iteration of DARPA figure out how to get high powered execs to use camera phones so they don’t have to be ferried around on jets. This category system, which bifurcates nature/culture, techno/social, underwrites the logic of multiple of our speakers. It keeps matter on one side and language on another, and assumes that the real can be directly represented through science with no translation. (Barad’s intra-activity is precisely about interpretive apparatuses as well.) This bifurcation shields a positivist view of science from cultural critique, isolating it from apparent social concerns while masking relations of power that constitute the science in the first place (as when Kurt Spellmeyer does a body count on communist totalitarianism and claims that capitalism has brought better quality of life to (an unmodified) everyone, and as when someone last week referred to “seamless capitalism”). We saw this in action today when Michael asked the completely relevant question about the role of the environment in the future of digital humanities. First his question was cast as a purity project—as though any of us could be innocent or non-complicit, and therefore we were all off the hook. Finally his question was met with variations on the positivist project: we’ll engineer ourselves out of it; don’t worry about it now—we’ll think of the solution later. This begs the question of the social change gestured to early in the morning’s presentations. Social change for whom, and for what ends? There is no indication that environmental and other social justices concerns will stop being relevant (hopefully it will start being relevant for some). In fact, the problem as posed in the seminar places these outside of the collective conversation we are having. Let’s talk about the material in a very deep way. Marx, Haraway, and Katie King refer to some variation on frozen social substance, congealed labor, or frozen social relations. These all involve looking at a material object and tracing its conditions of possibility back to its raw materials. These conditions include the politico-socio-scientific-economic contexts that make production possible. This is a powerful mode, deeply in conversation with technology and science, deeply in conversation with social justice, and deeply reflexive. This method, Sandra Harding’s strong objectivity, and Barad’s onto-ethico-epistemology are all perfectly available to scientists. We can’t abdicate responsibility for politically grounding science (including technoscience). But science shouldn’t need a native informant from the humanities to do this for them. Haraway reminds us that people who want the world to be a better place need science because it is utopian and visionary. But Eugenics, for one, was a utopian and visionary scientific project.