UnConference or MutateConference?

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Timothy Burke

This morning I was drawn to a post by Mitch Joel claiming that the “unconference movement” is dead.

I hadn’t encountered Joel’s blog before, so I hope I’m not reading this piece out of the context of his usual commentary. In any event, my response isn’t entirely about this one entry. I’ve only been to two events that were trying to be “unconferences” in some sense, and I’ve never been involved in trying to facilitate one, so there’s nothing about his critique that strikes too close to home, no wound it inflicts on me.

But there is something in the response that frustrates me, and it’s not just about unconferencing. There’s a pattern here that extends across a much vaster terrain. As I said in my Twitter feed, “Do as thou wilt” and “Ur doing it wrong” don’t add up. Joel is hardly the first person to try and say both of them at once.

Let’s take unconferencing. The idea here, as I see it, is to not just systematically question everything that doesn’t work about an existing model of conferencing, collaboration, and meetings but to invent new forms and practices that act on that critique. That alone makes the movement or whatever you want to call it a great thing: there’s nothing worse than endlessly circling around an awareness of how broken or stale existing practices are while feeling condemned to repeat them indefinitely. The one time I sat on a major professional association’s program committee a decade ago, I suggested that it would be a great idea if we just dropped virtually all of the standard paper-presentation sessions in favor of roundtables, workshops and spontaneous discussions, a sort of proto-unconferencing move. But there wasn’t any space in business-as-usual to entertain that idea. It was clear that if I were serious about it, I’d have to make it a crusade. My colleagues weren’t against a change exactly, but they felt there were reasons why we had a lot of small, boring sessions attended by six or seven people who passively listened to papers being read to them and changing that would cause serious problems for many members. Crusading on this subject struck me as a bit lower on my priority list than getting an unnecessary root canal. Smarter by far to just do an end run and invent new practices under new banners, as unconferencers have.

It’s the new practices part that seems to me to be the point: that unconferencing opens up what had been a closed, ritualistic and expensive domain that put very high transaction costs on collaboration, discovery and conversation between people with shared interests and projects.

It sticks in my craw when a move to openness becomes an occasion for a new closure. Which is how I read Joel’s complaint: that the unconference should have a purity test, its own Dogme 95 policed by dour adherents, that it has to be the dialectical opposite of the conference in every respect. In that case, you do not mean UN, you mean ANTI. Which will require the perpetual zombie reification of an ancien regime mode of conferencing as well. Every anti- needs its pro-, every post- needs its unhyphenated Other. To “un” something seems to me not to commit to a perfect opposite but to seek a massive radial evolution of new forms, to open a space, to emancipate.

What I hear in Joel I hear a bit of when #Occupy meetings insist dogmatically on human mics, circles and so on. Or the way that I can remember student activist meetings I participated in the 1980s mandatorily concluding with a sort of offbrand pseudo-Maoist self-crit session. Moves intended to criticize the rigidity and hierarchy of some other form of group or collaboration sometimes harden quickly into their own form of exclusionary orthodoxy, their own fetishized manners. To me a perfect unconference or rally or online collaboration or what have you would be a jam session, a moveable feast. Improvisation has signal, it has pattern, it has structure, it has plans, but it also has the freedom to say or play what it seems right to say or play at that moment. Whatever works is what I want to be free to do, what the work of the “un” ought to accomplish, to make working an always-provisional, always-scrutinized, always-open value. Let a thousand models bloom, and then cross-pollinate.

This isn’t just about one mode or tradition of collaborative practice. Ultimately this distinction, this different sense of what it means to “UN-” something, strikes right to the heart of the most extravagant and exciting promises that congregants gathered in the house of Shirky try to uphold. I really believe you cannot set yourself against attempts to protect worn-out traditions through enclosure and monopoly with your own enclosures, your own moves to exclusive ownership. Otherwise it just comes off like an attempt to evict the old sheep farmers so that you can breed goats on the same fenced-in pastures, a casting of one brand name against another, a strategy of transfer-seeking.

Openness is a sensibility long before it is found expressed in anything more concrete, and it requires a delight in the mutations and adaptations that follow from an intervention into a closed space. It rests on a gentleness of regard towards the practical and imaginary moves made by others, an encouragement of remixing and reinvention.

Posted in Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 3 Comments

The Work of Criticism

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Jumping straight out of my Twitter feed about THATCamp Games, I want to work a bit more on a reaction I had to a morning panel on teaching games in a higher ed class.

I heard a pretty strong strain of thought that naturalized the proposition that the first thing to do with games in a class is to interrupt the activity of play, to stop the fun, to compel students to a critical attentiveness to the content and experience of a game. The student who knows how to play video games well was taken to be a sort of pedagogical enemy, both because they ‘split’ the instructors’ attention between the skilled player and the students who have never played and because the expert gamer was taken as a figure who actually has few or no critical thoughts about their consumption of games.

The problem of a class with split levels of preparation, competency, or cultural capital is a real one that comes up in much of higher education, so I don’t mean to belittle it. But because it’s so common, it might be a good thing to not see as specific or special to games except in who has that expertise or cultural capital within a classroom.

But the idea of the expert gamer as a sort of idiot savant who doesn’t want to talk about games, doesn’t think about games as a critical subject, and who is having altogether too much fun with games to be trusted as a practicioner of criticism worries me. Here too I don’t think this construct is limited to games as a cultural form. There’s a mirroring construction in film and television studies, indeed, in the relation of most bodies and pedagogies of academic cultural criticism and communities formed around and through cultural consumption. Literature professors often encounter and complain about the student who arrives in their classes with a professed ‘love of literature’. We sometimes come to see our job as grimly breaking those blithe spirits on the wheel of the hard labor of criticism and dismissing them from our company when they refuse to come into the quarry and break stone.

We set our teeth to this bit first because we hold dear the notion that criticism is work because it has work to do, that criticism has a function which requires training to perform, which is desperately needed as a part of the critical transformation (or preservation) of some wider sociocultural project, and towards which there will be opposition. A labor to learn, a labor to enact, a labor to endure.

We also do it because something which is fun, pleasurable or passionate seems an easy target for elimination within the academy, or indeed any contemporary institution with limited resources and a productivist sensibility. Yet it is against this sentiment particularly that humanists so often howl in protest in other ways, resisting the idea that what they do should ever be reduced to its naked, barren utilities. Why then it should be so urgent to disrupt, prevent or spoil the experience of culture when it seems passionate, pleasurable or fun is something of a mystery.

Nor do I think there is much sense in making the expert gamer, the romantic reader, the artist who creates for personal satisfaction, either an enemy of criticism or absent of a critical faculty. “Expert gamers” engage in a great deal of criticism: it simply isn’t expressed in terms that are native to scholarly enterprise, nor is it often concerned with the things that earn academic critics their reputation capital. But there’s a lot of value in the discourse of expert gamers for academic critics, and I think academic critics would find that this door swings both ways: there are things expert gamers want to know that they would gladly look to scholarship to engage.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Games and Gaming | 5 Comments

A Way To Think About Online Courses (By Apple, For Example)

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Timothy Burke

So Apple’s big education-oriented product announcement has come and gone.

I’m going to tread softly here about what it might lead to, because I’ve been wrong before on tech rollouts (both overestimating and underestimating impacts). In general, most of what was discussed in this announcement seems to follow Apple’s established pattern of looking at what other companies and institutions have been trying to do and doing some redesigns of the hardware and delivery channels for those services or products.

Back in the middle of the first dot-com boom, I was asked with some other Swarthmore faculty to attend a presentation by a tech company trying to sell us on digitizing courses and moving to some kind of online delivery of a portion of our curriculum. The main argument they offered was that if we didn’t get on board right now, with their company, we’d be out of business tomorrow because everyone else would be on board with them and we’d be the last analog dinosaurs left on an Earth for small, nimble mammals. For a residential liberal-arts college that emphasizes high-quality teaching in a small, intimate community, that seemed like roughly the Stupidest Idea Ever. It was like an undertaker showing up and trying to convince you that you could save a lot on a funeral plan if you’d just commit suicide right now.

One thing that struck me during the meeting, though, was that if you created a really rich body of materials that looked somewhat like an “online course”, what you really might be doing was crafting a completely novel form of publication. Imagine a work of historical scholarship that included video of the author giving an explanatory lecture at the beginning of a section of the reading; that had direct links to a huge body of archival pictures, audio recordings, maps, and other supporting materials; that extensively linked to relevant (or competing) analyses available in digital collections like JSTOR; and where the author would appear live once every week to take questions from students reading the book in a class.

If you think about it, some “online courses”, whether the Khan Academy or the AI class at Stanford or maybe what Apple’s putting forth, are beginning to converge on something like this design: publications which incorporate materials that have a pedagogical or instructive dimension to them. As a straight-up replacement for an actual small, focused face-to-face class, it’s pretty clear that any online course is going to fall seriously short. But as a kind of publication that works alongside of classes, or that imports some of the substance of classroom pedagogy into their multimedia mix, and which are a guide to self-guided learning or a supplement to a course led by a teacher? I think there’s some real potential.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Swarthmore | 3 Comments

There Is Nothing You Possess That Power Cannot Take Away

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Timothy Burke

…to paraphrase what Belloq says to Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The problem with a rights-based liberalism is precisely that it is not and never can be the end of history, that it is never secure or stable, that every liberty claimed through toil and protest, no matter how acclaimed and cherished and generative, is one day away from the firing line when some powerful interest decides that some right or practice is inconvenient.

It doesn’t even matter if the end of a right, a freedom, a possibility will ultimately hurt that powerful interest. The contemporary businesses who have registered a powerful stake in exceptionally restrictive monopolies over intellectual property have themselves been enormous beneficiaries of a conception of the public domain as a fundamental and irreversible right of a free society. No matter: they would now see it ended. Better to kill the future than live in a present where you can only have two Ferraris in the driveway.

Hollywood and the music industry have tried repeatedly to kill media technologies and practices which ultimately have returned them enormous profits. I have in my basement industry-produced videotapes that if Jack Valenti had had his way would never have been sold to me. There was money that left my pocket and went to the businesses he represented. And yes, I have videotapes I recorded off of television. Many of those I purchased in another media format later precisely because having videotapes sustained my desire to have those films and shows available for viewing. Videotaping (or making audio tapes) was the precondition of the explosive growth of a market for older visual culture as a consumer commodity. Think back to the early years of television: it never occurred to any of the people producing and owning that intellectual property that it might have value in the future. The more that we have been able to buy and copy, the more that we want. And much of the time, the more that we will pay for.

Enclosures don’t just hurt the commons, they ultimately hurt the new lords of the manor. This is part of the point of rights, of limited government, of checks and balances: that to safeguard the future even of the powerful, you have to restrain everyone from getting everything they think they want right here, right now.

What’s increasingly apparent about law, rights and liberties in the United States is that we have lived in our times in a bubble, an interregnum, a moment where some agencies and operations of the U.S. government, most particularly the Supreme Court of the United States, have moved to align the operations of law and authority with a properly expansive vision of human freedoms and Constitutionally-protected rights. That moment is passing, the pendulum swinging to more Gilded Age norms of brutalist law enforcement, oligarchic license, and an open sanction to the use of military power at the whim of the executive.

Nowhere is this clearer than with intellectual property and the public domain. The Court’s majority in the Golan v. Holder decision are only the stone that seals the tomb, not the murderers who slit its throat. Which means what it has always meant: that those of us who believe in a public domain, whose professions are defined by a sacred commitment to its existence, whose lives were enriched by its existence, will have to fight every day forever to bring it into resurrected glory and then to hold dear its life when we do so. Waiting for the Court, the Congress, the President, the government, the powers-that-be, to live up to the trust they hold, or even to recognize where their own long-term self-interests lie, isn’t good enough. It was comforting for a time to see justice and freedom advance from those precincts, but that led to leaving the door unlocked for burglars.

Posted in Intellectual Property, Politics | 4 Comments

Just Because You’re Paranoid

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Last month, I had a really interesting opportunity to participate in an open peer review for the project Writing History in a Digital Age. Somewhat to my dismay, I found myself falling into old-fartism in various ways as I made my comments.

One of the responses I had at various points, though, isn’t just limited to that project. Thomas Malaby and I wrote an introductory essay for Game Studies a while back that got an interesting reading from Alex Golub over at Savage Minds. One of the things that we suggested is that disciplinary enclosure of most areas of conceivable study will happen sooner or later, with an accompanying loss of generative, imaginative ways to think about that subject matter.

There are signs of that at times in work that self-identifies as digital humanities, and it’s something of the same split move we saw in game studies, between those that would like to create a new, separate disciplinary project and those that would like to safely domesticate “frontier” subject matter for incorporation into the safe metropole of an existing discipline. Digital humanists, however, are both consciously fretful about those possibilities and in many cases ideologically committed to avoiding them. This is one of the main sources of the “meta-ness” and self-referentiality of much DH discussion, which sparked a good deal of tweeting and blogging in the last week, of how to avoid, disrupt or defer moves towards enclosure by disciplines or towards splitting digital humanities off as its own discipline and keeping alive an insurgent challenge to business as usual.

One of the dangers to that commitment is a tendency to invest too much in an abstract imagining of the Other of digital humanism, a sort of pervasive tormenter and antagonist who is everywhere and nowhere at once in the academy, a sort of superset of all academics who are not expressly committed to the use and exploration of digital culture, information technology, open access, and so on.

Some of the practices and structures in academia which are most inimical to the professed goals of many digital humanists are supported largely by inertia rather than strongly felt commitments. That’s actually harder to overcome, but it’s important not to personify inertia or give it more intentionality than it has.

This is not to say that there are not opponents to digital technologies, open access publishing, blogging and so on within the academy. There are. Some opposition is passive or snarky, largely about the comforts of that inertia. Some is much more active, passionate and articulate. I’d rather deal with the latter, because that’s a conversation that can take place largely within the idealized norms of scholarly debate and process. It’s mostly the former, however. That’s where the danger of overimagining an opposition comes into sharpest focus.

The peril is threefold. First, that digital humanists come to anticipate too much that they will be uniquely the target of passive-aggressive opposition, which is bad for both the future development of an institutional project and for the individual careers of scholars, particularly junior scholars. I happened to be reading in the last few weeks within several different strands of the history of various scientific and technological research projects and with stunning regularity the individuals whose work has eventually become foundational orthodoxy were treated with disdain or bemused condescension at the outset of their careers. To some extent, casual and thoughtless snark and condescension are famously everywhere and anywhere in academic life that you care to look for them. If you’re a junior academic, you can pretty much count on the fact that at least some of your senior colleagues think (based on no real engagement or knowledge) that your work is trivial and that you’re a lightweight. Most of the people who think that way won’t have the malice or energy to act on it. But some of them might if they sense a vulnerability, and one of the ways to communicate that is to seem overly anxious about whether there will be opposition to your work or ideas. This kind of passive-aggressiveness is like the old saw about dogs only biting if they sense fear: the best way to keep it at bay is to act as if it doesn’t exist at all, to be as serenely and matter-of-factly confident about what you’re doing as you possibly can be.

The second problem is that arguing in favor of a project or idea through a repeated recounting of its marginalization relies on a construction that has become ubiquitious in almost all struggles for resources or power. E.g., so much advocacy for any program, project or policy seems to require situating it as the victim of some dominant program, as the periphery of a center, as the underdog. Part of the danger of that construction is that it relieves a pressure to make fully conceptualized arguments on behalf of such a program, resting instead on a moral appeal against persecution. But more pertinently in this case the problem is this strategy is now often the prelude to becoming a disciplinary orthodoxy in academia, the way we make a place for ourselves and then settle in to hold the line against the generation behind us. For digital humanists, that strategy is far more inimical to the substance of their ideas and commitments than it would be for, say, rational-choice analysts or social historians.

The third problem, and the one I think is most pertinent to Writing History in a Digital Age, is that stressing out too much about opposition often leads you to miss out on allies who substantively agree with everything you have to say but who work on a completely different subject, in a different medium, or in a different context. So, for example, the digital humanists who believe strongly in the potential of information technology to commingle public, ‘amateur’ and scholarly productions of history, or to circulate scholarly knowledge in new ways, shouldn’t overlook other clusters of scholars who’ve been laboring to accomplish the same things without digital technologies.

I don’t want to be pollyanna about these issues. Junior scholars do need to watch for serious antagonists, and do need institutional protection. Some changes only happen because they’re argued for forcefully, and some forceful argument requires calling out unjustified or irrational opponents in precisely those terms. However, a lot of change in institutions that have long memories and that plan for their long-term survival happens a bit magically, as a critical mass comes together. A theory or a project or a methodology can seem isolated, lonely, persecuted and then hey presto! everyone’s doing it and it’s hard to remember the days when they weren’t. I think the road to that moment is smoother when there’s less angst about opposition along the way.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities | 2 Comments

I Endorse These Messages

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Remember when people used to use blogs mostly just for shout-outs to other bloggers? Ok, they’re often still for that purpose, but it seems to me that Twitter serves that function far more efficiently. Also, with my own bloggorhea, I’ve always been more likely to drone on about something on my mind than to link to work by others.

But two pieces which I read this week have really reverberated with me. The first was Bethany Nowviskie’s “It Starts on Day One”, at the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s ProfHacker column. Nowviskie argues that graduate programs in the humanities should completely wipe out all of their existing methodology courses (she uses the metaphor of a comet hitting the dinosaurs).

I’d agree with her first complaint against such courses, which is that they often teach methods which aren’t really in use any longer, or are inflected with an unthoughtful ethos of wariness or hostility towards digital infrastructure. The second argument she advances I worry about a bit more, which is that many such courses are “a crash course in academic jargon and en-vogue theories”. I’ve previously voiced my own sympathy for the “more hacking, less yacking” vision of some digital humanists, but it’s important not to kill the small mammals along with the dinosaurs, not to let an insurgent energy overwhelm some of the pedagogical wisdom that’s come out of existing practice. In this case, what that might mean is that we shouldn’t forget that making and problematizing are not binary states. Methods classes that are so entirely about doing or practicing that they never stop to be troubled about the purposes and aspirations of doing very quickly become mechanical and arid. “How” should never become the mortal enemy of “why”, “so what” or “who says so?”

Nowviskie rightfully says that a graduate curriculum must include consistent, persistent attention to the “uninterrogated policies and procedures that cover and shape the humanities in the modern college and university”. That’s very much my own feeling, and a driving force behind my continued blogging. But it’s crucially important not to turn many of the critical commitments of digital humanists into the one uninterrogated idea in that process. E.g., if we are going to teach graduate students in a new methodology course how to work with new platforms and publication forms that reconfigure intellectual property or create open access, we can’t step over the question of whether they should. Whenever you’re dealing with a whether kind of discussion, it’s important not to close all the escape hatches. That’s where methods classes have to come back to theory, to problematizing, and without any stopwatch ticking that says, “Hey, we only have five minutes for gnawing on our own entrails, then we have to get back to learning PHP.” This isn’t just an important pedagogical and ethical obligation: it’s also the currency of the humanities. Methods which are cut-and-dried, just about making, just about doing, just about following the recipe, are by their nature somewhat orthogonal to the spirit of humanistic inquiry.

This leads me to the second piece I really liked in this past week, at Ian Bogost’s blog. Now, look, to some extent this essay is just Bogost being Bogost: whether in tweets, blogs or books, you get the clear sense that he exemplifies the quip about not wanting to be part of any club that would have him as a member. The voice that I’ve built up on this blog over the years is so sedately reasonable that I can’t really write in this space any longer in a more expressive way, as I once think I could, but if I could, I’d probably write very nearly what Bogost says in this entry. Bogost says to humanists that if there’s a crisis in the humanities, they’ve got no one to blame but themselves.

To quote at length, he writes:

“We are insufferable. We do not want change. We do not want centrality. We do not want to speak to nor interact with the world. We mistake the tiny pastures of private ideals with the megalopolis of real lives. We spin from our mouths retrograde dreams of the second coming of the nineteenth century whilst simultaneously dismissing out of our sphincters the far more earnest ambitions of the public at large—religion, economy, family, craft, science.”

Digital culture, he adds, is good for the humanities for the simple reason that “computing has revealed a world full of things: hairdressers, recipes, pornographers, typefaces, Bible studies, scandals, magnetic disks, rugby players, dereferenced pointers, cardboard void fill, pro-lifers, snowstorms”.

Where the evenhanded compulsion of my public voice kicks in the wake of his complaint is simply to say that the things scholarly humanists care about, they care about earnestly, passionately, sincerely, and much of how they care about what they care about would be easier to appreciate if those passions were sized to their subject better. Bogost is complaining in part about something that Bruce Robbins observed some time ago about the political posture of many cultural studies scholars: that they simultaneously assume that the stakes of scholarly work are so very high that the least form of error (political, interpretative or empirical) is devastating in its possible impact and that scholars and intellectuals are peripheral, unimportant and marginalized (and must somehow figure out how not to be). The consequence of that dual construction is that the simple pleasures of humanistic writing and teaching get washed out and so too the simple possibilities of talking with publics about culture and ideas in a conversation that could satisfy everyone involved.

Scholarly humanists, taken as an abstract whole, are now so anxious about so many things: their prestige, their authority, their exclusivity, the stability of their subject, that they strain the patience of anyone or any group more serene in its sense of place within the university or the culture. And that anxiety often leads to lashing-out in all directions: at enemies both powerful and weak, at baffled witnesses and sympathetic friends, even to purification rituals within the ranks. I don’t think it has to be that way at all. Bogost thinks the answer is a purge. I think the answer is both as difficult and as simple as a more relaxed, humble and curious approach to being humanists, to scale down the claims we make and the stakes we impose.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 5 Comments

Pictures from an Institution 9 (Visitors)

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Catching up here with some photo sessions from the fall.

Broadly speaking, my theme of the visual documentation of faculty work always has two accompanying problems. The first is that some of the work of faculty makes for a lousy picture, or can’t be pictured at all. I’m just finishing my fourth tenure dossier review of the last four months, and I’ve done a fair amount of peer review recently as well. I can’t actually give any picture of that without puncturing confidentiality.

Second, much of what faculty do as a part of their professional duties is also very pleasurable or interesting. For so many people, it’s not work if it’s not unpleasant and burdensome. Before we get to any of the other reasons why there is some popular dislike of professors, I think the fact that academic labor is often enjoyable is a mark against it: we get to think, to write, to explore our interests, to merge our personal vision of the world with our professional obligations. Or, as in this case, to listen to, converse or present to a variety of interesting visitors to our workplace. We go out into the world, but at many campuses, the world also comes to us. Still, it is work in the sense that it takes time, it takes effort, and it produces value for our employer as well as ourselves.

Visitors are like a slow-motion but also humanly satisfying version of the serendipities I often find in digital culture. A team or a group is travelling to campuses like Swarthmore: I don’t know in advance they are coming or often even that I’m invited until a week or two before the visit, but then the day arrives and I find I learn something completely new. Or I find out that something I thought was a problem unique to us turns out to be widely shared, or what I took to be an improbable ambition has been accomplished. Sometimes they’re reassuring: old friends are still friends, and as reliably insightful as ever. Sometimes they are transformative: a look at work I’ve never even heard of that once seen becomes central to my thinking about a problem.

Posted in Pictures from an Institution, Swarthmore | Leave a comment

Discovering the Template

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Timothy Burke

I’m very restless with my syllabi and with the courses I teach: I do new preps fairly often and tend to overhaul substantial portions of existing courses equally often.

In thinking about new classes, I tend to ask myself:

1. What’s a subject that interests me personally, whether or not I do dedicated research on it? There’s nothing worse than a class taught as a obligatory sacrifice to the disciplinary gods.
2. What’s a subject that I believe is likely to make sense to our students, be interesting to our students? If I pick something I think is interesting but that has no traction or connection to what any of our students believe to be important, I have to spend a lot of extra effort to explain what the class is about and why it matters. That might be worth it on occasion, but the key thing is that I can’t design a course of that kind and then skip that extra effort.
3. What’s a subject where the material I can assign, particularly readings, is lively and diverse and plentiful? A subject that’s potentially interesting but has mostly developed through leaden, specialized or obscure scholarly writing is not a good topic to teach to undergraduates.
4. What’s a subject where both the nature of the topic and the material available lets me present a variety of divergent ways to think about and make use of the subject matter? A subject that’s interesting but only within a scholarly or constrained intellectual tradition is not a good subject to teach to undergraduates.

What I’ve become aware of over time is that the syllabi that result from following these rules have a consistent implicit design to them. I haven’t consciously planned to make my classes this way, but as I look back at what I’ve done for the last decade, I see the same structure over and over again.

While I put a premium on material that I think can spark interesting conversations, and on a heterogeneity of voices and approaches, very much privileging material by non-academics as much as by scholars, I can see that another thing I often do in my courses, particularly thematic classes, is provide a “spine” narrative that supports the discussion. For all that I think “coverage” is an uninteresting objective for a class, I clearly recognize that without some core storyline or knowledge base, a class would be nothing but 14 weeks of “another interesting reading”: fun and diverting, but not giving students any sense of cumulative ownership over the subject, a sense that they know something that can be brought to bear in unexpected and creative ways on later readings (and on later experiences once the class is over).

To give an example, take a look at my spring 2012 syllabus for The History of Reading. The first third of the course is a highly compressed overview of the “standard narrative” of the historiography of reading and the book: pre-Gutenberg, Gutenberg & early modern print culture, massification of print, globalization of print culture. Rather than trying to give a full, rich view of particular historiographical nodes of debate at each stage along the way, I basically pick on or two readings as synecdoches: Eisenberg and Darnton for Martin, Febvre, Johns and all other early modern & post-Gutenberg analyses, or Rose for much of the literature on massification. Hofmeyr and Khumalo for globalization, here picking Africanist work simply because it’s what I know best.

I feel that the more typical impulse from many scholars setting up a class like this is to want to take one or two more tightly circumscribed periods and locations and really get into the back-and-forth of scholarly debate and research. For me, this is just that “spine” that establishes a baseline knowledge that the students can then bring to bear on all sorts of other claims about reading, the book, print culture, literacy and the like, both later in the class and in their research papers. I also have noticed that I frequently place a more universalizing or cognitivist text at the front of courses with this design, to put history as a discipline in some kind of perspective.

The second portion of the class is just a selection of materials about reading and books that I find engaging, written for larger publics. Again, looking at my syllabi, I see now that I usually try to make this move at this point in a course, taking the more specifically scholarly historiography and putting it into relationship with some broader, wider set of reflections about the topic.

The third part of the class is where I try to make the history pay off as a way to read and reconsider contemporary debates of some kind. Most of my classes have as their fundamental argument that contemporary practices and debates have a hidden “genetics” behind them, that there are histories embedded within them that shape those practices without any conscious intent. Or alternatively, I hope to suggest that issues and questions which are taken as being unique or special to our contemporary moment are not, and that the study of the past can usefully unsettle that perception. The point is, one way or another, I want to see what happens when we try to put the historiography to use. Maybe in this case we’ll decide that many of the obituaries being written for the book or for reading are not only in error, but that this is only one of the many moments where it’s been commonplace to believe that reading is at any end. Maybe we’ll decide that reading is genuinely undergoing a revolutionary reinvention (or a total eclipse). Maybe we’ll decide that reading should be knocked off its throne, to be one of a multitude of literacies worth having. Maybe we’ll feel that reading is wonderful but that the modes and practices of reading privileged by the scholarly humanities are killing that which they profess to love. I have no idea. The point is that just covering an academic subject is pointless if the students don’t get some chance to put it to use. And if they get that chance, one of the options on the table always has to be that concern for the subject itself is an impediment to some important or practical outcome. If I’m teaching African history, for example, I feel obligated to offer students at least a glimpse of the ways in which you might decide that “African history” is not the subject frame that you need for studying human experience that has taken place on the African continent.

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | Leave a comment

The Author Is Human

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Stanley Fish’s NYT response to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence is actually a pretty useful provocation in several respects.

As I read it, Fish basically moves to identify digital humanists as playing out the next move of postmodern politics and epistemology. I think that’s both right and wrong. Fish argues that most digital humanists believe in diminishing the human subject (which he labels DH’s ‘theology’) and in reconstituting the institutions which govern, imagine and interpret human subjects (which he labels DH’s ‘politics’). Fish sees these moves as prescriptive. Fair enough as a reading of Fitzpatrick’s book, which argues for major changes in academic practices.

But many digital humanists in the academy think that many of these visions of how academics should produce knowledge and participate in culture are also an accurate description of how culture and knowledge are being and have been produced in global society since at least the rise of print culture. Digital humanists are therefore not just arguing for new practices, but against persistent mythologies about established practices. If DH has a “theology”, then to some extent its theses are nailed to the wall of the old humanism, a protest against its corruptions and illusions.

To push the metaphor a bit further, this is also where DH is very much not postmodernist in any strong epistemological or political sense. DH doesn’t leave the church, it just wants to be in it in a different way. In DH, authors are not dead, just brought down to human scale. There are still individual acts of authorship, distinctive moments of creation, original imaginations in both the digital culture of the present and the newly-seen culture of the past. This is not a hive mind, not the multitude. There are still texts meant to be fluid, partial, ephemeral, and texts written with other kinds of craft and other kinds of long-term prospects in view.

Moreover, much of the postmodern view of diminishment was essentially despairing, a kind of mournful cry for the unities and power of the failed modernist subject. DH’s diminishment is both pragmatic and hopeful. Pragmatic in that it describes how culture actually gets produced, and thus liberates us from the psychologically burdening and idolatrous worship of the Great Men and Women who create culture (and scholarship) that ordinary people can only consume (and cite). It reveals that most authors (in whatever medium and institution) are only just little people behind the curtain, aided in making a big show by the machinery of criticism and the accumulation of cultural capital among elites. Across every medium you care to name, what digital technologies are revealing is that the set of people who make “good culture” is vastly larger than what the post-1945 gatekeepers of high culture claimed: that there are hundreds of good photographers, webcomics creators, fiction writers, scholarship producers, documentarians, sketch artists, for every one that late 20th Century gatekeepers claimed there were.

The hopeful part of it, which drives Fitzpatrick’s book, is that in recognizing that this is how culture not only is, but probably always was, we can design intentional practices of cultural production and knowledge dissemination that will use our new technologies and our new understandings as rocket fuel for a culture, a politics, a way of being that really will be novel. But this in part is just about self-knowledge, about honestly recognizing what we have been already and living with ourselves as we are.

Posted in Digital Humanities | 4 Comments

Saying It Again

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Timothy Burke

From the department of pointless but compulsory exercises: every single time Rick Santorum or anyone with similar views says the following two things:

a) What, you want gay marriage? What’s next, legitimating polygamy?

and

b) The only form of legal, sanctioned marriage that any human society in all of human history has ever sanctioned is between one man, one woman,

the following rejoinder should be automatic from anyone in the audience to whom these things are being said:

c) Actually, Rick, the most commonly sanctioned or legalized form of marriage in human history across a wide span of societies has been polygamy, albeit with numerous variants. You might notice this if you actually read the Bible like you claim to.

However, there’s something more at stake in this special cultural conservative version of an all-Cretans-are-liars paradox. It’s not just a question of whether it’s ignorance or cynicism lurking behind political pandering.

What this paired sentiment expresses more deeply is have-cake-and-eat-it-too vision of modernity and progress among cultural conservatives, and not just in the United States. I see something of the same in the most skilled recyclers of the tradition-modernity relation that was given its undead power under colonial rule in 20th Century African societies.

If I were able to actually have a conversation with Santorum in which the historical reality of sanctioned polygamy in most human societies was made impossible for him to ignore or soundbite into oblivion, I’m willing to bet that the likely way out of the trap would be to argue that contemporary life has overcome that old evil, that we’ve progressed. Santorum and other American Christian conservatives would likely put the origin of that progress somewhere other than secular liberals would. They’d probably ascribe it to the rise of Christianity, all the way back to the early Church, whereas a more secular (or at least not religiously conservative) view would probably be than contemporary companionate, monogamous marriage (or any companionate, monogamous relationship, really) is a direct consequence of the working out of liberal individualism and rights-based personhood after 1750.

But it really doesn’t matter which claim you turn to. If you think that the relative eclipse of polygamy (still practiced and legally as well as morally sanctioned in many parts of the world) is a good thing, as I presume Santorum does given his suggestion that legally sanctioning gay marriage would open the door to polygamy, you believe in progress, that some aspects of the human condition have improved over time through the deliberate efforts of human beings to reform or change their social structures. And the moment you believe in that, saying, “It’s natural for people to live a certain way, all societies have done it that way” is off the table as a justification of contemporary policy whether or not your claim about the naturalness of living that way is true or not.

(Which, in fact, Santorum’s claim about the universality of nuclear families and monogamous marriages is not. Not in any way, including its address to homosexual practices. The foundation stone of ‘the Western tradition’, classical Greece, very much included sanctioned homosexual relationships between male citizens, for example.)

The moment you accept that progress is the real explanation for a transformation in human practices that you defend or endorse, you shouldn’t be able to invoke the universal, unchanging natural character of that practice against some other argument for yet another change or reform.

And yet, of course, this is done all the time, because the rhetorical alternatives are to either embrace arbitrary bigotry or construct some weird Tower-of-Babel claim about the future consequences of reform. E.g., in the case of gay marriage, if modern companionate relationships are a good example of progress, that means that we’re capable of changing how we legally and socially sanction and regulate marriage or relationships for the better. If we’re capable of that, why not include sanctioning companionate relationships between same-sex couples? With the invocation of unchanging, natural traditions disallowed, the only ‘why nots’ left are: because we should hate or despise same-sex couples for fundamentally arbitrary or non-rational reasons; or because sanctioning same-sex relationships would lead to further bad consequences. American cultural conservatives often take a stab at the second argument in public discourse (indeed, that’s where Santorum leads into his ‘oh noes bestiality-will-be-legal’ line) but this is an even easier set of arguments to puncture: either the imagined consequences are those which already follow in full measure from legally sanctioned heterosexual relations or they involve a vision that legal sanction is the same as contagion, that it creates practices that would not otherwise exist, a belief that has a lot of odd collateral implications.

Posted in Cleaning Out the Augean Stables, Politics | 1 Comment