technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking

The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) will host the 3rd annual Nebraska Digital Workshop from Oct. 10-11, 2008. We are seeking proposals for digital presentations by pre-tenure faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students working in digital 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," "cannon," "masterpiece," "masculinity," "whiteness," "race," "sexuality," "gender," "technology," etc. 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 In|Formation Year is to say that one doesn't know a think about information or technology unless one understand a host of other relations that support or subordinate. We were play with "in" and "inter" thematics as a way of injecting the concept of "information" with complexities. The other part I did not make overt enough in my talk is how much what HASTAC is doing 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, 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." This is everything from 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) 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. I'm working on mind/brain narratives in 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 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.

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 trying to figure out why we're ostensibly on the cutting edge, visionary, the future, etc., but some of our categories seem really static and unexamined. Some examples: Technology. This is perhaps the most bandied about term, and I think it would be good to be very clear and explicit about what we mean. In practice, we mean electrically powered silicon based tools that require vast political and economic infrastructures. I think we could benefit from denaturalizing some of our assumptions about these technologies and seing them situated in those contexts. It also could help us see the non-silicon based technologies that are necessary for their operation. Some of the global effects of these technologies are the need to secure energy supplies because our use of energy is quickly outstripping our supply--this is a lot different from finger pointing at SUVs. It also means treating various countries as toxic waste dumps for the heavy metals from both the production and disposal of computer components. The global infrastructure also guarantees the low cost of electronic gadgets because they are made in places with lax environmental and labor protections and weak social infrastructes. This is not, as Larry Smarr says, because of the cultural differences in these countries insofar as they just don't share our values [!], but as Saskia Sassen reminds us, because of the economic infrustructures including usery (20% or better debt servicing) that allows western nations to dictate the terms of those social infrastructures. Our gadgets do not spring like Athena from the heads of our revered engineers as they repeat the mantra "Moore's law, Moore's law, Moore's law."

Gaming isn't my thing. I really enjoyed Thursday's presentation from Tracy Fullerton, especially the thoughtfulness she gave to game design. I'm wondering about game thinkers in the seminar: can Herbert Marcuse's concept of repressive desublimation, Gregory Bateson's work on play and cybernetics, or Georges Bataille's fascination with excess help us dig into gaming worlds differently and/or more deeply? [And is what you do different or the same as game theory of the cold war period which seemed to be about how to figure out if we were winning the arms race?]

OK, so, plenty of very interesting ideas so far, but I have to say that today's talks were electrifying--and I'd guess not just for me given that people stuck around until almost 2:00 to hear out the speakers in the Q&A. I have lots of thoughts so I'll necessarily be partial--in both senses of the term (and with a nod to Haraway)--and I reserve the right to amend and nuance this later. My thoughts just at this moment are about interdisciplinarity, and I think folks in the humanities and the human sciences are better about it than the sciences. I'll just put that out there as a claim. Herman Gray in just a very narrow talk referenced several people who are social scientists and deeply engaged with and invested in science. And he also referenced a 20th century example--ending in 1972--of the Tuskegee syphillis experiments.