Disconnections

To my understanding, the post-human "situation" described by Kittler diagnoses literature with a terminal illness, if it does not register a death which has already happened: "the dream of a real visible or audible world arising from words has come to an end"(14), and "under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say" (263). For Kittler, the differentiation of the Lacanian orders of the real/the imaginary/the symbolic respectively associated to the emergence of phonography, cinematography and of new writing techniques such as typewriting, "exploded Gutenberg's writing monopoly around 1880." (16) The Lacanian triumvirate used by Kittler works well for the argument of the book, but I am not sure it conveys the complexity of the question of "mediality" as raised by the translators in the introduction to his book.

I see the association of phonography with the order of the real, although I wonder about its validity when I think of how music, which preexisted recording and audio techniques, prevails over white noise or recording of daily life noises or of silence, in our usage of audio devices. I see the association of cinematography with the order of the optical imaginary, although I am convinced that cinema is linked with the real, even if, as argued by Kittler, "instead of recording physical waves, generally speaking it only stores their chemical effects on its negatives"(119). What I don't even see very clearly is that the symbolic order embodied by the typewriter "now encompasses linguistic signs in their materiality and technicity" (15). But this might simply be due to my dumbness.

To move on, Kittler argues, in a very Foucauldian move, that "understanding media remains an impossibility precisely because the dominant information technologies of the day control all understanding and its illusions" (XL) and that "what remains of people is what media can store and communicate" (XL), but even the mere fact that he is writing this book proves his perspective to be a little too schematic and assertive and that there are residuals of human resistance to the assumed reality for which "numbers and figures become the key to all creatures" (19). "Understanding" might not be the right word, but "studying" and even "sensing" media and even our own "understanding" as modified by them, remains a possibility.

As an open ending, I will share the questions that I kept asking myself after reading this book. Is the agency of writing really gone because of the discursive changes brought in by Kittler's triumvirate of technologies? Isn't writing (graphein in Ancient Greek) an indissoluble part of these inventions, as the words which define them (phonography; cinematography; typography) inscribed in them? Don't we still write literature, even in different ways, today? And is literature today either only meta-literature or a nostalgic, romantic embodiment of a human activity which cannot make any sense of the world in which it is created? Was the printed word really the hegemonic queen of human perception before the 1880s? And, last but not least: what do we mean by words, and what do we mean by literature?

DH as τέχνη

Before starting, I have to admit that I am quite moved by Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology," and for a series of different reasons. First, I can't stop noticing and admiring how the text is formally capable to embody the arguments it makes (and un-makes.) "The Question Concerning Technology" is in fact an incredibly complex, mysterious "constellation" of ideas, to borrow one of my favorite images in the text (and an image that is also central in W. Benjamin's writings,) rather than a self-contained piece of linear knowledge. The text exposes the contradictions and shortcomings of a consequential linearity of thinking that is employed as a method and at the same time is discarded, or, at least, is shown to be “never quite enough.”

Another thing that strikes me and moves me, is to realize how crucial and up-to-date Heidegger's reflections are for the current state of DH theory, and not simply because Heidegger's perspective can be easily put into efficient use to dismiss that "instrumental conception of technology" which constitutes the center of many reductive interpretations of DH work. Another thing that Heidegger’s piece does, for DH, is to show that there is a larger and far more complex question to be asked, when thinking about the way in which we deal with technology, a question that can also be illuminating for understanding the origins of that same "instrumental conception" which shapes the thinking of many of us, and not only regarding technology. 

To put it simply, Heidegger is bothered, he is bothered by the "illusion that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct" (332), he is bothered by the fact that, since Descartes on, the separation of subject and object, of Being and being(s), of (humanistic) thinking-thinking and (scientific) calculating-thinking has become an accepted and predominant way of reasoning. And this same separation has also brought to the separation of arts from crafts and sciences and to arts’ isolation (and possibly, neutralization) in the realm of the "aesthetic." So Heidegger goes back to when τέχνη was still (also) art and was still, just as art, a "bringing forth," "a revealing" activity in which subject and object, intellect and thing, still corresponded to one another. And Heidegger calls for a re-union of art and technology, or better, for the coming into existence of a poetical technology, i.e. for a revealing technology, a technology that makes, and does not merely serve, a technology that brings into presence new understandings and new conceptions, new contacts with primal truths, a technology that questions thinking, and therefore language, for "all ways of thinking lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary" (311). 

Of course, and thank god, I am not sure of what Heidegger means, with this final provocation about technology and art. That's why I am sure I could re-read it a thousand times and still enjoy it. But for the purpose of this post, written today, for this class, I would say that DH can benefit from Heidegger’s provocation by working, theoretically and practically, on configuring and imagining itself as a new τέχνη, as a form of scholarship of which thinking and making, philosophizing and calculating are indissoluble components, and in fact, indistinguishable from each other. "The Question Concerning Technology" suggests the potentials of liberating both art and technology from their respective places of relegation and unite them to better think about their essence, and the potentials of liberating our own thinking about technology from its conceptual relegations, so that it could look at larger pictures, beyond the frames that technological thinking tends to create. And perhaps Heidegger is explicitly assigning to art the role of teaching us how to do this, which I believe is a significant fact to consider when we talk about the contribution of 'traditional' humanists to DH. Heidegger suggests that the fear of technology by which these humanists often feel overwhelmed comes from a poor understanding, or perhaps from a forgetting of, technology’s poetical essence.

9/16. (In)finite Thinking: a Question of Limits.

I am sorry, this is not going to be a funny post. If you like dark comedy, well, maybe yes. I have been suffering from a severe form of apeirophobia since the age of 5. Concentrating on the problem of infinity, on the idea that I am a finite human being with a capacity for a potentially infinite thinking, scares me to death: I feel entrapped, in a cage, choking. I am serious! I go insane, until I find distraction. Being raised a Catholic does not help, for the concept of eternity works as a materialized version of the pure panic I experience when I try to grasp the heavy concept of infinity. When I encountered Maths, I felt attracted and disgusted at the same time: it looked like a brave, possibly self-delusional, attempt to symbolize and systematize what cannot really be symbolized and systematized. I preferred to take refuge in language(s): I identified with its openly acknowledged confusion, imprecision, arbitrariness.  What I failed to understand is that Maths could have actually helped me to contain and give shape to my logical and existential uneasiness. Leibniz's idea that "human thought can be reduced to calculation" (Davis 121) never crossed my mind: using thinking to control thinking, embody thinking and make it more efficient, but most of all, using thinking to understand the same mechanisms of thinking and to free it from its own paradoxical limits, is something I never really took into serious consideration.

After an intimidated and "foggy" reading of Davis, a question of limits emerges as a crucial point in my reflections. Let's try to think in these terms: computers are limited machines that respond to algorithms imposed by limited human beings. We give them inputs, and they do it. We delimit what we think is computable and we create these machines that each time redefine our logical limits. In fact, we cannot keep everything under control, Leibniz's optimistic "calcolemus!" is not enough. Among other things, the undecidability of the so-called halting problem is a negative answer to the Entscheidung problem, and again, it poses a question of limits. There is something that inevitably escapes our logical thinking, we are still dwelling between the finite and the infinite, we try to delimit our thinking and, yet, we can't. 

Reading Davis not only made me feel extremely fascinated by - and full of intellectual respect for- logic, but it also made me smile ironically at my long-time rejection of Maths as "the enemy." Obviously enough, things are not so simple, and abstract maths and logic are in fact naturally interconnected with what we call "the humanities." In this sense, Davis' book can be used to prove "traditional humanists" wrong in regarding computers as "the enemies," because, in the end, they are not only products, but also representations and co-actors of our own human thinking. And what do they do for our thinking? They empower it, and they help it to move further: they embody its limits and push them forward. In this sense, they are subjected to our thinking, but they also change it, they are our slaves and our masters. They depend on us and we depend on them. DH, then, can be regarded as a rather pragmatic acceptance of the new ways in which we try to make sense of the world, an acceptance that will presumably, gradually bring to a renovated understanding of how we form knowledge and of what we consider knowledge to be. 

9/9 DH Manifestos

I want to start my reflections about these first readings for ENGL 946 by concentrating on John Unsworth's title "What is Humanities Computing and What is Not?" and I have two specific reasons for wanting to start from there. The first reason is my radical predilection for the term Humanities Computing in lieu of Digital Humanities. It's not a nostalgic move toward a better, simpler past: when Digital Humanities were still Humanities Computing I was still completely unaware of their existence as a new field, discipline, or, better, "practice of representation and way of reasoning,"(Unsworth) "social category" (Alvarado) or "social undertaking" (Kirschenbaum), "array of convergent practices" (DH Manifesto '09), "set of ontological commitments" (Unsworth), and so on and so forth. I like "Humanities Computing" better because I feel that what "Digital Humanities" might be doing, as a term, is exactly to reinforce that commonplace view of the digital as mere tool which people invested in this work are constantly fighting against. While "Digital" is, and feels, semantically, as an adjective, an addition which does not substantially change the noun it precedes, "Computing" is this versatile -ing form which juices up the noun it follows. My preoccupation might sound somehow over-linguistic, pedantic and even irrelevant, and yet I think that the second part of Unsworth's title, the question "What is Not?" justifies my worry. So here I come to my second reason. It seems to me that the "anxiety for self definition" by which the discipline (yes, this is how I want to call it, and I'll be sure to explain why later) is affected, according to Alvarado (and many many others,) is producing not only a number of affirmative and rather beautiful definitions but also many negative definitions (which remind me of a manifesto-of-poetics line by Italian poet Eugenio Montale, "All I can tell you now is this: / what we are not, what we do not want".) Unsworth specifies what HC, or DH, is not, and even talks about charlatanism referring to pseudo-DH enterprises, the Manifesto repeats the same move and underlines it through its graphically emphatic "Is(n't)" and its "process not product" slogan, Burdick et al. also devote some paragraphs to make sure misunderstanding do not take place. Now, if it's true that such an anxiety for a self-definition that has to be achieved not only through constitutive, affirmative declarations, but also through negations aimed to avoid common misunderstandings, exists, the choice of "Digital Humanities" seems to me particularly unfortunate.

I have to confess that I admire this negative, dialectical component of DH's construction of identity for which it is necessary to declare what one is, but most of all what one is NOT. Perhaps because my primary field is literary translation, I feel sympathy for complex, interdisciplinary "modes of scholarship"(Burdick et al.) that struggle for recognition in academia and fight against the stereotypes that label them as mechanic, linear, applicative approaches that "do not really change or contribute to the understanding of the texts they are working with; they only facilitate their reading" (I intend text veeeery largely, of course. Also, I do not know who I am quoting but you know that somebody - multiplied per thousands- have said that.) I am convinced that DH and literary translation share a lot: they both tend to produce "material" interpretations and arguments instead of theorizing them; they both have a certain utopian excitement about their potential achievements, followed by an always present, counterbalancing dystopian sense of the limits of what can and cannot effectively be done, considering one’s resources and one’s existing ‘language’, a language that always has to be respected, even if it can definitely be progressively challenged and renovated.And perhaps for this reason I felt attracted by DH, to the point of moving to Nebraska from Italy in order to learn more about them. Since then, my obsession has been and still is a fully theoretical and fully utopian, possibly delusional, one. Let me expose it briefly: Matthew Kirschenbaum argues that “Digital Humanities is about a scholarship and a pedagogy that are publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed.” Well, this is an appealing idea as applied to translation. Translation needs this visibility, as invoked by Lawrence Venuti (see http://www.translationindustry.ir/Uploads/Pdf/venuti.pdf) : it needs to expose its own decisional processes and make them visible to the readers. And it needs to offer readers a critical apparatus (which could consist of a commentary on alternative solutions; explanatory and analytical digressions; contextual sections; semantic fields) that traditional print-based editions do not allow, for space reasons, but also because of the fixed, classical idea of translation as a finite operation. Translation needs to expose its non-finiteness and its non-autonomy, it needs to denaturalize its supposed function of neutral communicative transfer, and show its interpretative moves as well as the inevitability of its teleology. It needs to make visible its processes of constant revision, and it needs to interact with readers and with other translations (for example, of the same text in the same language, or in different languages and historical moments). This visibility is one that DH would not merely facilitate and enhance, but create and define, thus illuminating the nature of the complex, impossible, and yet ever-necessary task of translation.

And now I come to my final point. I did promise to clarify why I choose to call DH a discipline and here I am. Notwithstanding my enthusiasm and two full Nebraskan winters, I have only moved the first steps in the DH world, and my translations have not yet been substantially changed in the way I create them and represent them. Why? Because I am still a literary translator who needs to learn lots of skills and to start doing real work and get "dirty hands" before, hopefully, developing into a real digital humanist who does literary translation. But students to come could be given the chance to be "born so," by having been fully and "deliberately trained to be digital humanists" (Unsworth) with specializations in history, literature, translation, sociology, geography, and so forth, from the very beginning of their academic career. In this sense, I am strongly convinced that DH needs to be regarded as a new discipline, or better, interdiscipline, and to be institutionally legitimated as such.

This blog was created for the purpose of participating in class discussions for ENGL946 , 'Readings in Digital Humanties' (Prof. Stephen J. Ramsay, UNL).