I have had a great deal of trouble figuring out how to approach the final stages of this project. I'm still not sure I have come to any conclusions, but I am just going to dive right in with an analysis of Stanley Fish's opinion articles on the digital humanities, as featured in The New York Times.
For someone as active and giant in the field of literary criticism and interpretation, I searched Fish's column archives expecting a great deal of content on the digital humanities. I wasn't sure what his take on them would be, but I thought that the man who gave the world interpretive communities would have quite a bit to say about a huge blending of (potentially) global communities.
What I found were three columns from a little over a year ago, and that is all. They are as follows:
"The Old Order Changeth"
"The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality"
"Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation"
The articles were all published from December to January 2011-2012. I'll try to do a short summary of all three and then go in to an assessment.
They begin with "The Old Order Changeth," as Fish is perusing the 2012 MLA Convention program. He finds that "if you like the way literary studies were done in 1950 or even 1930, there will be a department or a journal that allows you to proceed as if nothing had happened in the last 50 or 75 years," which is something he says he observed a long time ago. No surprise there: I've been recently struggling with the fact that I have read a painful few contemporary authors, and even fewer emerging ones, during college. In a field that celebrates the "greats" and is still plagued by the shadow of the Canon, it seems literature will always try to hold on to all of the old guys. And rightfully so, in my opinion.
Then Fish weaves in another observation about the program line-up: there are very few of the "topics that in previous years dominated the meeting and identified the avant garde — multiculturalism, postmodernism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, racialism, feminism, queer theory, theory in general." He recalls when postmodernism was the biggest topic at the MLA convention and how so many refuted the tradition-devouring, textual-shaking, Canonical-demolishing philosophy:
The metaphor Fish sets up relates the digital humanities to a religious phenomenon. "Religion," he writes, "is the location of, and for many the source of, renewal, aspiration, redemption and hope... there must be a redeemer. Who or what shall it be? Again, according to the program, it can only be one thing — the digital humanities... The digital humanities is the name of the new dispensation and its prophets tell us that if we put our faith in it, we shall be saved."
Describing digital humanists as prophets and using the world "shall" make the passage drip with his patronizing. His tone continues with his metaphor into the next article. He begins with a bashing of blogs calling them "...provisional, ephemeral, interactive, communal, available to challenge, interruption and interpolation, and not meant to last." His complaint stems from his own career: "...whereas in a professional life now going into its 50th year I have been building arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive and, most important, all mine."
In his field, he has always had "a desire for pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power" on a subject or theory, and that "is what blogs and the digital humanities stand against." Here, Fish sets up an "Us or Them" attitude. At the core, digital writing stands against that "authority and disciplinary power" because digital text is always malleable and editable. A writer doesn't have to get everything "right" the first time, because the writer can always go back and change it. More than that, in a collaborative atmosphere, there are many other people who can make additions, subtractions, edits, and rewrites to a "text." He quotes Kathleen Fitzpatrick from her book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, as saying:
Fitzpatrick's statement seems to harbor one of the the biggest problems Fish has with the digital humanities: "text in process." He calls the idea an "oxymoron," and he is right. After all, how could a text -- something traditionally considered finite and solid -- ever be in process? The fact that a digital text is in a state of constant flux completely removes the linearity of text, and thereby the notion of what textness is. In addition, the fact that there is a possibility of multiple people collaborating in, as Fitzpatrick says, "a fertile community composed of multiple intelligences, each of which is always working in relationship with others," Fish says that the concept of the author disappears as well.
The new text and the new author are now, in Fish's assessment, "...everywhere and nowhere, produced not by anyone but by everyone in concert, meaning not waiting for us at the end of a linear chain of authored thought in the form of a sentence or an essay or a book, but immediately and multiply present in a cornucopia of ever-expanding significances."
Fish's main argument is that this vision of what the digital humanities means to authorship, communication, and, therefore, meaning, is both theological and political:
Those "infirmities" are "institutions that operate to keep scholar separated from scholar, readers separate from the creation as well as the consumption of meaning, and ordinary men and women separate from the knowledge-making machinery from which they are excluded by the gate-keeping mechanisms of departments, colleges, universities, university presses and other engines dedicated to the maintaining of the status quo."
Okay. There it is, but read on.
This is where the political portion of his assessment comes to play. By abolishing the status quo and giving the opportunity of knowledge to all (a buffet from the tree in Eden, if you will), Fish firmly plants the digital humanities as far left on the political spectrum -- though, he admits, there are no real politics involved here. But, they are, in a sense, a revolution in the way we think about the humanities and how we address the situations that have been looming over them for years. Fish equates the rhetoric used by digital humanists as revolutionary:
Here is where Fish is hung up. It seems that Fish is one of those he mentioned in the first column who put up a fight against postmodernism. The difference is that Fish says that postmodernism became "domesticated and absorbed into the mainstream," which indicates that it came from outside of the mainstream -- namely academia. The digital humanities, however, have arisen from the mainstream, for the mainstream, and one of the many things they do -- as Fish has pointed out -- is make knowledge that was once exclusive to the academy available for all. Not only that, they provide an infinite stage -- infinite in both space and time -- from which anyone at all can flaunt their potentially limitless knowledge. Power to the people, indeed.
And that is what, it seems to me, Fish is hung up on. He ends the column by pointing out the digital humanities claims that they can, first, pull more support from a society that has recently rejected the traditional humanities, and, second, "confer on students skills that will be attractive to employers inside and outside the academy." He quotes Paul Jay and Gerald Graff as saying that, because of the nature of what the digital humanities teach, students will be equipped “to enter fields related to everything from writing computer programs to text encoding and text editing, electronic publishing, interface design, and archive construction.”
I'll speak more on what Jay and Graff said in a different post. What I'll say now is that Fish leaves it hanging. No analysis of this at all. He then simply asks the questions, "Does the digital humanities offer new and better ways to realize traditional humanities goals? Or does the digital humanities completely change our understanding of what a humanities goal (and work in the humanities) might be?" Valid questions, to be sure, but it is almost as if Fish didn't want to address the fact that Jay and Graff are right (again, more on that later). Fish then ends with a subtle quip against blogs that only make the chains that he has fastened to the wall of his academy more visible.
I'll end by saying just a very few words on his final column, because this post is huge, and his last column is pointless.
Fish sets up the answer he concluded with in the previous column by offering an example of literary analysis. His analysis is centered around John Milton's "Areopagitica" (yes, that is a link to an ebook, a product of the digital humanities). In order to spare any of the thick details, Milton was writing about Presbyterians being censored by Episcopal bishops. Fish states that in one of the passages, there is a huge proliferation of the p and b sounds. It is obvious that the amount of alliteration in the passage means something, but to fully come to any specific conclusions, " I would have to demonstrate that Milton self-consciously put the pattern there and made it the formal bearer of his argument. I would have to build a chain of inference that led from the undoubted, countable presence of the “b’s” and “p’s” in the passage to Milton’s intention and back again."
This is formal analysis: "the noting of formal properties to the drawing of interpretive conclusions." The point he wants to make is that the digital humanities do the opposite. They take a hypothesis or an idea and simply, as he puts it, "run the numbers." The issue boils down to the idea of "close reading." Could a computer or program that could look up all of the p and b sounds actually come to some conclusion with the data? Or would we need some close reading with historical, political, social context (a contextual framework) to really delve deep into meaning? Do we need formal analysis? Or do we need algorithmic criticism?
The rest of the column is focused on this issue, and it is clear that Fish is for his own style of literary theory. All of the digital humanists and theorists he quotes are undermined in some way, and his whole view of what the digital humanities has to do with literary theory seems to be hung up on this idea of running the numbers to get meaning. His whole take on the subject, to me, is incredibly flawed. The digital humanities seem to be so much more than that, and that is something I will address in later posts.
Finally, after three columns I'm assuming that he was paid for, Fish cops out, still looking down his nose:
My argument is not so much that he needs it, but rather that -- in my scope of understand as to what the digital humanities are -- his kind of criticism is just as relevant to the digital humanities as many other kinds of theories are. And he should hope that I'm right, because the way things are shaping out in the digital world, Fish's criticism might already be old hat.
Then Fish weaves in another observation about the program line-up: there are very few of the "topics that in previous years dominated the meeting and identified the avant garde — multiculturalism, postmodernism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, racialism, feminism, queer theory, theory in general." He recalls when postmodernism was the biggest topic at the MLA convention and how so many refuted the tradition-devouring, textual-shaking, Canonical-demolishing philosophy:
"old questions were revealed to be based on a mistaken belief in the stability of texts and the self-identity of authors; rock-solid procedures and methodologies were shown to rest on the shifting sands of history; canonical authors were dislodged from their pedestals and exposed as racists, misogynists and apologists for empire; the canon itself was condemned as an artifact of patriarchal politics; and the practitioners of traditional criticism (yesterday’s stars, today’s relics) were denounced for being complicit with every evil known to humankind."Now there's a new kid in town, a "new insurgency," he says, called the digital humanities. He defines it as:
"an umbrella term for new and fast-moving developments across a range of topics: the organization and administration of libraries, the rethinking of peer review, the study of social networks, the expansion of digital archives, the refining of search engines, the production of scholarly editions, the restructuring of undergraduate instruction, the transformation of scholarly publishing, the re-conception of the doctoral dissertation, the teaching of foreign languages, the proliferation of online journals, the redefinition of what it means to be a text, the changing face of tenure — in short, everything."It is here that Fish sets up the tone and a metaphor he carries through the rest of this column and the others. The overarching tone in the columns ("blogs", he is forced to admit in the second one) is one of faint cynicism rooted in a vast amount of knowledge that he is not ashamed to flaunt, and riddled thick with theoretical rhetoric. My harsh criticism should not indicate that I entirely disagree with Fish, nor should it say that his opinion is devalued to me (I'm not a literary theorist, after all). However, the tone is the strongest indicator of his opinion of the digital humanities, and it sounds like he doesn't like them. Why doesn't he like them? Read on.
The metaphor Fish sets up relates the digital humanities to a religious phenomenon. "Religion," he writes, "is the location of, and for many the source of, renewal, aspiration, redemption and hope... there must be a redeemer. Who or what shall it be? Again, according to the program, it can only be one thing — the digital humanities... The digital humanities is the name of the new dispensation and its prophets tell us that if we put our faith in it, we shall be saved."
Describing digital humanists as prophets and using the world "shall" make the passage drip with his patronizing. His tone continues with his metaphor into the next article. He begins with a bashing of blogs calling them "...provisional, ephemeral, interactive, communal, available to challenge, interruption and interpolation, and not meant to last." His complaint stems from his own career: "...whereas in a professional life now going into its 50th year I have been building arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive and, most important, all mine."
In his field, he has always had "a desire for pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power" on a subject or theory, and that "is what blogs and the digital humanities stand against." Here, Fish sets up an "Us or Them" attitude. At the core, digital writing stands against that "authority and disciplinary power" because digital text is always malleable and editable. A writer doesn't have to get everything "right" the first time, because the writer can always go back and change it. More than that, in a collaborative atmosphere, there are many other people who can make additions, subtractions, edits, and rewrites to a "text." He quotes Kathleen Fitzpatrick from her book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, as saying:
“we need to think less about completed products and more about text in process; less about individual authorship and more about collaboration; less about originality and more about remix; less about ownership and more about sharing.”
Fitzpatrick's statement seems to harbor one of the the biggest problems Fish has with the digital humanities: "text in process." He calls the idea an "oxymoron," and he is right. After all, how could a text -- something traditionally considered finite and solid -- ever be in process? The fact that a digital text is in a state of constant flux completely removes the linearity of text, and thereby the notion of what textness is. In addition, the fact that there is a possibility of multiple people collaborating in, as Fitzpatrick says, "a fertile community composed of multiple intelligences, each of which is always working in relationship with others," Fish says that the concept of the author disappears as well.
The new text and the new author are now, in Fish's assessment, "...everywhere and nowhere, produced not by anyone but by everyone in concert, meaning not waiting for us at the end of a linear chain of authored thought in the form of a sentence or an essay or a book, but immediately and multiply present in a cornucopia of ever-expanding significances."
Fish's main argument is that this vision of what the digital humanities means to authorship, communication, and, therefore, meaning, is both theological and political:
"The vision is theological because it promises to liberate us from the confines of the linear, temporal medium in the context of which knowledge is discrete, partial and situated...and deliver us into a spatial universe where knowledge is everywhere available in a full and immediate presence to which everyone has access as a node or relay in the meaning-producing system."What he is basically saying is that the digital vision of the humanities is an information afterlife (be it Heaven, Nirvana, Jannah, Elysium, or whatever you'd like). There is no separation from the All-Knowing because everyone is connected to -- and the purveyors of -- any and all knowledge that ever was. To me, this sounds like a grand idea, but I can't fully understand how Fish feels about it. "What it does, he says, is take away the linearity from meaning and communication and create "steady yet dynamic state where there is movement and change, but no center, no beginning and end, just all middle... a new era of expanding, borderless collaboration in which all the infirmities of linearity will be removed."
Those "infirmities" are "institutions that operate to keep scholar separated from scholar, readers separate from the creation as well as the consumption of meaning, and ordinary men and women separate from the knowledge-making machinery from which they are excluded by the gate-keeping mechanisms of departments, colleges, universities, university presses and other engines dedicated to the maintaining of the status quo."
Okay. There it is, but read on.
This is where the political portion of his assessment comes to play. By abolishing the status quo and giving the opportunity of knowledge to all (a buffet from the tree in Eden, if you will), Fish firmly plants the digital humanities as far left on the political spectrum -- though, he admits, there are no real politics involved here. But, they are, in a sense, a revolution in the way we think about the humanities and how we address the situations that have been looming over them for years. Fish equates the rhetoric used by digital humanists as revolutionary:
"The project is insurgent in relation, first, to the present exclusionary structures of access and accreditation and, second, to the hegemony of global capitalism of which those structures are an extension. Digital humanities, declares the Manifesto, “have a utopian core shaped by its genealogical descent from the counterculture-cyberculture of the ’60s and ’70s. This is why it affirms the value of the open, the infinite, the expansive [and] the democratization of culture and scholarship.”We see this more and more everyday. There are many free online institutions. Berkeley is one of many colleges that publishes podcasts of professors' lectures online for free. There is the on-going debate about the on-line badge system relating to the academic and professional world. And even outside of the academic world, knowledge is only a Google search away. Fish is right is his assessment that the digital humanities will crumble some of the institutional walls that have been standing too long (tenure, for instance). It is in the nature of the digital humanities to be subversive in the same way every new generation is somehow subversive to the one that came before. However, I believe the power and effect that the digital humanities have -- not to mention the massiveness of the scope -- has an unprecedented effect on the way we think about everything.
Here is where Fish is hung up. It seems that Fish is one of those he mentioned in the first column who put up a fight against postmodernism. The difference is that Fish says that postmodernism became "domesticated and absorbed into the mainstream," which indicates that it came from outside of the mainstream -- namely academia. The digital humanities, however, have arisen from the mainstream, for the mainstream, and one of the many things they do -- as Fish has pointed out -- is make knowledge that was once exclusive to the academy available for all. Not only that, they provide an infinite stage -- infinite in both space and time -- from which anyone at all can flaunt their potentially limitless knowledge. Power to the people, indeed.
And that is what, it seems to me, Fish is hung up on. He ends the column by pointing out the digital humanities claims that they can, first, pull more support from a society that has recently rejected the traditional humanities, and, second, "confer on students skills that will be attractive to employers inside and outside the academy." He quotes Paul Jay and Gerald Graff as saying that, because of the nature of what the digital humanities teach, students will be equipped “to enter fields related to everything from writing computer programs to text encoding and text editing, electronic publishing, interface design, and archive construction.”
I'll speak more on what Jay and Graff said in a different post. What I'll say now is that Fish leaves it hanging. No analysis of this at all. He then simply asks the questions, "Does the digital humanities offer new and better ways to realize traditional humanities goals? Or does the digital humanities completely change our understanding of what a humanities goal (and work in the humanities) might be?" Valid questions, to be sure, but it is almost as if Fish didn't want to address the fact that Jay and Graff are right (again, more on that later). Fish then ends with a subtle quip against blogs that only make the chains that he has fastened to the wall of his academy more visible.
I'll end by saying just a very few words on his final column, because this post is huge, and his last column is pointless.
Fish sets up the answer he concluded with in the previous column by offering an example of literary analysis. His analysis is centered around John Milton's "Areopagitica" (yes, that is a link to an ebook, a product of the digital humanities). In order to spare any of the thick details, Milton was writing about Presbyterians being censored by Episcopal bishops. Fish states that in one of the passages, there is a huge proliferation of the p and b sounds. It is obvious that the amount of alliteration in the passage means something, but to fully come to any specific conclusions, " I would have to demonstrate that Milton self-consciously put the pattern there and made it the formal bearer of his argument. I would have to build a chain of inference that led from the undoubted, countable presence of the “b’s” and “p’s” in the passage to Milton’s intention and back again."
This is formal analysis: "the noting of formal properties to the drawing of interpretive conclusions." The point he wants to make is that the digital humanities do the opposite. They take a hypothesis or an idea and simply, as he puts it, "run the numbers." The issue boils down to the idea of "close reading." Could a computer or program that could look up all of the p and b sounds actually come to some conclusion with the data? Or would we need some close reading with historical, political, social context (a contextual framework) to really delve deep into meaning? Do we need formal analysis? Or do we need algorithmic criticism?
The rest of the column is focused on this issue, and it is clear that Fish is for his own style of literary theory. All of the digital humanists and theorists he quotes are undermined in some way, and his whole view of what the digital humanities has to do with literary theory seems to be hung up on this idea of running the numbers to get meaning. His whole take on the subject, to me, is incredibly flawed. The digital humanities seem to be so much more than that, and that is something I will address in later posts.
Finally, after three columns I'm assuming that he was paid for, Fish cops out, still looking down his nose:
"But whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play. Nothing ludic in what I do or try to do. I have a lot to answer for."Somewhere in history, Pontius Pilate washes his hands. With that finale, Fish never wrote another column/blog for The New York Times on the digital humanities again (that I have been able to find). After all of the words spoken, the conclusion is that he doesn't need it.
My argument is not so much that he needs it, but rather that -- in my scope of understand as to what the digital humanities are -- his kind of criticism is just as relevant to the digital humanities as many other kinds of theories are. And he should hope that I'm right, because the way things are shaping out in the digital world, Fish's criticism might already be old hat.
