Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 418.
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: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 09:35:25 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <w.mccarty@btinternet.com>
Subject: merry greetings
Dear colleagues:
As many here will know, each year on or about the Winter solstice I send
out what for me are Christmas salutations and seize the occasion to reflect
on Humanist, humanities computing and related things. At this time of year,
despite all evidence to the contrary in this gloomy wet-bricked
working-class Victorian suburb of London, I find myself imagining a snowy
landscape -- which years in Ontario, Canada, often in fact gave me. I could
put us all on a horse-drawn wagon, make us merry revelers in heavy coats,
scarves, hats, mitts and boots headed to some brightly lit, fire-warmed,
mulled-wine-smelling house. Which I very much hope you will be going to at
some point during the holidays, or as near to a place of celebratory joy as
you might want. But my melancholy soul won't leave well enough alone: up
into these cozy imaginings bobbs a long-submerged bit of Eliot ("So
Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna / On the field of battle") to remind
me that a question is begging to be asked - a question often enough asked
of us wired scholars: just where are we going?
Bad answers in the popular and, alas, academic presses grow like stubborn
weeds, thorny with determinisms. Such as: that the future will be
thus-and-such, positive or negative as suits the visionary. Or more
deviously: that once upon a time (e.g. when the Web was in its infancy) we
had the genius to see how things were going and so invested appropriately
(e.g. in years of work on Web-based projects). Hurrah for us, and too bad
for those who didn't see what we saw. This, however, is not even a wisdom
in hindsight but an intellectually damaging hallucination, for the past
never was like that, and the present can't be either for the sharp-eyed
among us. Or so, powerfully, says the ethnographer Greg Dening in his
curiously marvellous book, Readings/Writings (Melbourne, 1998):
"The webs of significance of any event, place or person are fine-lined and
faint. It takes a lot of looking to see them. And the answers to any
question that we have of them are never obvious, because the questions we
ask of them are not the questions the people of the past were asking of
themselves.... The most unhistorical thing we can do is to imagine that the
past is us in funny clothes. Our imagination has to allow us to experience
what we share with the past and see difference at the same time.... When we
empower the past by returning it to itself, we empower our imagination to
see ourselves. Our certainties are our greatest enemy when we approach the
past. Hindsight is always blinding. We know from our living experience that
our present moments--this moment--has all the possibilities of the future
still in it. None of us prescribes the reality we live in. None of us
controls the consequences of our actions. None of us can predict with
absolute certainty anybody else's reaction to the simplest gesture, the
clearest sign, the most definite word. But we have to cope with these
ambivalences, interpreting these never-ending possibilities. Hindsight, on
the other hand, reduces all possibilities in the past to one. Hindsight
leaches out not all our uncertainties, but all the past's uncertainties.
Hindsight closes down our imagination. In hindsight we do not see the past
as it actually was, only as it would have been if all of its uncertainties
were taken away. Hindsight freezes the frame of every picture of the past.
Hindsight removes all the processes of living. Makes the past our puppet."
("Empowering Imaginations", p. 208-11).
As a number of people have said, the advent (Christmas imagery!) of
computing has made the technology of the book sharply visible, and it has
thrown into relief both how good this older technology is for some things,
how poor in comparison for others. Hence at this historical juncture we are
getting very busy refurbishing the intellectual forms by which we make and
represent new knowledge of old things. At issue as we bump along toward
whatever future, dragging into it what we can from the past, is what the
past is that we may learn from it. What, for example, were the
possibilities open to the maker of this or that intellectual form, what was
he or she intending, how well did he or she succeeed in terms of that
intention? We don't measure success, Dening points out, by how nearly the
maker got to asking our questions, rather to asking his or her own, which
were asked in the context of that which at the time went without saying.
How, Peter Shillingsburg asked in a talk he gave in London recently, do we
hear that which goes without saying? "Imagination is hearing the silence",
Dening suggests, "because we have heard some of the sounds around it.
Imagination is seeing the absent things because we have seen so much else.
Imagination is an act of human solidarity, or rather, imagination is an act
of solidarity in our humanness." (p. 209).
Quite clearly the imagination of which Dening speaks is not just any sort
of speculation or fantasizing. There's a particular discipline to it, which
is to say training, hence the question of curriculum with which we in
humanities computing are becoming increasingly preoccupied: a curriculum
for developing the ability to imagine with our tools what we do not yet
know (Jerry McGann, quoting Lisa Samuels) as well as what we once knew and
what we have before us now to know. Work in various disciplines lies
readily to hand to help us build such a curriculum -- and in so doing to
discover and demonstrate how our practice belongs in and to the company it
is keeping. The strongest intellectual argument on our side is not based on
the benefits that applied computing brings e.g. to literary or historical
studies, although these benefits are now without serious doubt. Rather I
would think that the gold lies in how particular qualities of literary,
historical and other disciplinary imaginations help us to articulate a more
powerful humanities computing, which is in direct consequence better for
all the disciplines.
New fields need their independence so as not to be enslaved by others (I
paraphrase William Blake); the question, I suppose, is how that
independence is expressed institutionally. Thus the vital contribution of
administrative imagination in securing intellectual independence while at
the same time not isolating us from the academic commons. As the
interrogative tone with which "humanities computing" was once clearly
pronounced has become more and more difficult to hear, I've noticed a
curious thing that speaks to the need for this independence: those scholars
who claim humanities computing for themselves but whose perspective on it
admits only instrumental effects on their areas of interest. One cause of
such partiality, I suspect, is that for whatever reasons they are not, as
Dening puts it, listening "for the global conversations that are the
background white noise of all disciplinary talk" (p. 9). Is it that they
hear only the parole of their disciplinary tribe and so cannot properly
conceptualise the langue of which it is an expression?
But I do not want to end my solstitial message with intellectual
weed-control. Let us pursue that with vigour in the new year! Rather in
this time of imagination, when so many of us live consciously for a brief
time within old stories, allow me to wish you the best in the deepening
silence of these silent nights, amidst the bustle to be reminded by Dening
and others of how computing may be of as well as in the humanities, what
these humanities are and why we need them. Allow me to wish you the courage
to make it so.
All the best, WM
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