Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 510.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2000 11:02:32 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: contingencies of disciplines and scholarly forms
Simon Goldhill, "Wipe your glosses". In Glenn W. Most, ed., Commentaries --
Kommentare. Aporemata: Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte, vol 4.
Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999.
In this recent essay on the commentary in classics, Goldhill raises two
interrelated questions of interest for this seminar. The first is the
relationship between one's conception of language and the form of the
commentary (or, as he says, between styles of glossing and styles of
knowing), the second is the socio-historical contingency of these styles,
a.k.a. disciplines.
In addition to concentrating on the epistemological fashions in classics,
Goldhill provides a number of useful references to studies of the same in
other fields, including German archaeology, philology, anthropology,
psychoanalysis (pp. 382, 410-11). I pass the reference along because I
think that studies of this kind are quite important to our developing
argument for humanities computing. They help to undermine the disciplinary
walls in the common way that social constructivist arguments work (see Ian
Hacking's recent book, The Social Construction of What?) -- by showing us
that the situation we're in need not be as it is. We're alerted to the fact
that the disciplinary situation was made by people like us and so can be
remade by people like us. For all the practical value that these walls
have, they lead to a narrowness of mind that seems to me one of our
chiefest impediments. As a number of people have pointed out, an
interdiscipline cannot be resolved into its disciplinary components; if you
think in those terms, the crucial interaction is lost. What our field has
to offer intellectually becomes invisible.
Goldhill's essay is among several that discuss styles of glossing and
knowing -- among others Daniel Boyarin's on Midrash -- which wonderfully
gets down to some philosophical bedrock -- Marschies on Origin, Wagner on
Lao Tzu, Sluiter on didactics, Vallance on Galen, Krause on the art
historical scene and the late Don Fowler on criticism and commentaries in
the electronic age. Many of the particulars in these essays are relevant
only to specialists in the various conventional disciplines. Nevertheless,
reading across the collection (letting go, with however much regret, of the
passages in classical Chinese, Greek, Arabic etc) one sees how, as Goldhill
puts it, commentaries have been shaped by conceptions of language and
culture, and how in turn they have been used to close down as well as open
up meaning. How the mechanical details of the commentary form(s) show
epistemological roots and have had far-reaching consequences.
Why, I wonder, do discussions of this sort seem to me like our kind of
thing? We come on the scene not just with a kit-bag full of nifty tricks
("click here and X happens") but with the non-submissive, non-trivial
question of how these tricks should be deployed ("what do you want to
happen?"). With a critical focus on the artisanship of knowing. Do we feel
at home with these discussions because deconstruction makes way for
reconstruction, and both are preoccupied with how our forms of knowing
actually work?
Comments?
Yours,
WM
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities /
King's College London / Strand / London WC2R 2LS U.K. /
voice: +44 (0)171 848-2784 / fax: +44 (0)171 848-2980 /
ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/
maui gratia
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 25 2000 - 11:30:56 CUT