Reply to Scout's Ideas about the Humanities

I'm sorry I didn't respond to this earlier . . . thought I did but it went wandering in the stratosphere. I found this comment incredibly smart and helpful, Scout. For one thing, the whole reason for the deconstructive (talk about 80's theory!) slash between "In" and "Formation" in the In|Formation Year was to disrupt the idea that information is data and add the Web 2.0 sense that information is also about the complex formations of social networks, actors, agencies, identities, political formations, and on and on. I realize from your pointed comments that I was too much assuming we were all on the same page and at the same place about the need to deconstruct the whole agentless/powerless notion of "information" in the same way that we must such ideas as "humanities," "humanism," "canon," "masterpiece," "masculinity," "whiteness," "race," "sexuality," "gender," "technology," etc. I didn't actually tease out and explicate the assumptions or even talk about the point of that mischievous slash mark or our whole point in disrupting the idea that "information" was only about "technology" and that "technology" meant hardware and software. Not. Your comments have made me rethink the presentation, starting with what In|Formation means. In other words, "information" too often comes to us as a given, as if it is data, but the whole point of this massively networked and distributed In|Formation Year is to say that one doesn't know a thing about information or technology unless one understands a host of other relations that support or subordinate. We were playing with "in" and "inter" thematics as a way of injecting the concept of "information" with complexities--injustice is as crucial to in|formation as innovation is. This should not be a surprise to most people but it still is. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the question: "But what does injustice have to do with information?" Etc. The other part I want to return to because of your comments is how much what HASTAC is trying to do and SECT tried to do is disrupt the traditional (i.e. traditional since about 1940) territory of the humanities which, I believe, is so restricted, turf-y, limited, and provincial that it necessitates the tiresome "crisis in the humanities" that people keep blabbing about. I believe if humanists actually took seriously what they do and should do--the political work of understanding what humans do and think, in relation to other individuals and societies and in relation to the environment and non-human inhabitants of this earth--then we would not be in crisis but be key to addressing so many issues of the so-called "information [no Derridean/Barthesian slash] age." (I was so intrigued and so sad that Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb had to go outside of the humanities to do their incredible work. I don't want to be part of any humanities that excludes that kind of work.) My idea of "Big Humanities" is that we need to aim lots higher, think bigger and more boldly. To me, the humanities should encompass such things as the technologizing of life and death (stem cells, avatars, brain death, immunization, inequitable definitions of "life" and "health" and on and on) to the interrogating (in Haraway's sense) of the masculinist, capitalist biases in "science" and the narratives of science. I loved the last morning's theory/performance with Tara McPherson and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, not only for the experimental play, but for the theoretical invention that racism is encoded in moder technology from the forties on and quite literally at the level of the binary code. My new scholarly project happens to be on mind/brain narratives and the creation of "learning disabled" and "gifted" as categories and, there too, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, citizenshp are operative at the moment of disciplinary formation, precisely at the level of semiosis and lexicon (i.e. "code") of what is normative. These, to me, are humanities questions, and questions of in|formation of the kind that motivate me. Thanks for your great comments, Scout. I'm sorry not to have answered before. I've been thinking about them since you wrote them and would love to hear from you again and from others who have thoughts on this topic.