The Humanities in Transition from Postmodernism into the Digital Age

Nigel A. Raab

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000091489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The Humanities in Transition explores how the basic components of the digital age will have an impact on the most trusted theories of humanists. Over the past two generations, humanists have come to take basic postmodern theories for granted whether on language, knowledge or time. Yet Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and similar philosophers developed their ideas when the impact of this digital world could barely be imagined. The digital world, built on algorithms and massive amounts of data, operates on radically different principles.

This volume analyzes these differences, demonstrating where an aging postmodernism cannot keep pace with today's technologies. The book first introduces the major influence postmodern had on global thought before turning to algorithms, digital space, digital time, data visuals and the concept to digital forgeries. By taking a closer look at these themes, it establishes a platform to create more robust humanist theories for the third millennium. This book will appeal to graduate students and established scholars in the Digital Humanities who are looking for diverse and energetic theoretical approaches that can truly come to terms with the digital world.

1
Introduction

Well over a generation ago, a movement arrived on the academic scene and spurred a series of energetic debates that engaged the brightest minds on both sides. In the aftermath of World War II, a younger generation was ready for a fundamental reassessment of the Western project. If the Nazis were a reflection of a Western value system born in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, then the system was corrupt at its core. In the words of philosophers and literati, the core was formed by a rational worldview that could be as stifling and repressive as Enlightenment thinkers had believed it to be liberating. Rationality was the heart of the death star and had to be destroyed.

Combatant metaphors serve well because any attempt to undermine rationality was quickly challenged by traditional scholars who were convinced that the Western tradition with its emphasis on objectivity and rationality had improved the lot of human beings on planet earth. These scholars mocked the idea that knowledge was relative, that the outcome of science was the result of mob rule in the laboratory, and that human rights were a cultural construct. This stubbornness drew battle lines that were fought on many fronts, and these serious battles continued for decades.

As this division spread into curricula in colleges around the world, the academic environment became polarized between postmodernists and their predecessors. Postmodernists rejected attempts to save the Western tradition and urged their students to denounce male hegemony, discourses of power, and modern imperialism on the basis of some form of relativism. Much like the Slavophiles and Westernizers in Russia in the 1840s, the two groups could no longer walk on the same side of the street. Allan Bloom equated the demotion of the works of great white men with the closing of the American mind, as he titled his book.¹ Turning in the opposite direction, postmodernists saw their mission as the opening of the American mind and continued to fight vigorously against scholars such as Bloom.

Back then, postmodernism was in its early adulthood and acted with an energy appropriate to its age. If we can pin its adolescence to the seminal works by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault in the 1960s, by the 1980s it was a mature and widespread force that sought its own place in the sun. This was a well-deserved place, and with time, postmodernists no longer had to worry about being silenced. In the 1960s, to suggest that science was socially constructed was radical and ran up against massive criticism from outside the humanities. Nowadays, to say otherwise is to invite massive criticism from within the humanities. Postmodern ideas slowly entered the mainstream—checking a box marked gender rather than one marked sex comes to mind—and their vision was accepted, if reluctantly and with certain reservations, by the rest of the academy. Even if this was by no means a clear victory, shared space had been achieved.

But what happens to a movement once it achieves its main goals? In the 1920s, many suffragists were at a loss because now that women had the right to vote, they were not sure what to do. In the Soviet Union, dissident artists struggled with perestroika precisely because art designed to disrupt censorship laws lacked oxygen when the censorship laws were reduced or eliminated. Similarly, postmodernism lost much of its flair not because it was objectively wrong, but because it became commonplace. Instead of harnessing youthful energies, it became a tool for established scholars who were satisfied with a few pithy references to postmodern theories. If mention of the ‘gaze’ brought excitement and bewilderment in the 1970s, it has now become a cliché lacking vital signs. One need only look at the basic vocabulary in numerous current books. Readers will see frequent references to discourse, language, agency, social construction, cultural construction, and more. In fact, with the aging of postmodernism, some ideas have taken on the quality of a truth, the idea they were designed to oppose. References to social construction are presented as absolutes; to proclaim an event or a tradition as socially constructed is to proclaim a self-evident truth. In accepting the notion in such an unquestioning fashion, intellectuals are unwittingly reversing the direction of the postmodern impulse. The adolescent has aged and, like us all, struggles to cope in a new environment as trends change and innovations shift our thinking.

The most energetic and dynamic challenges come from the digital world. Scholars have been adapting to technological change for generations, but few could predict the sweeping impact of digital technologies. Whether in public life, in the scientific laboratory, or amongst humanists, the digital influence is never far away. In the most straightforward instances, it is a source of marvel because of the ease with which it makes information accessible; curious individuals can create web platforms and spread their ideas more broadly. In San Francisco, the Internet Archive has preserved massive amounts of web data, searchable and available for research projects. On the surface, all these innovations sound like practical tools that simply facilitate larger, more ambitious undertakings.

It is too convenient, however, to think of these digital technologies as mere instruments that assist the completion of ongoing projects. The digital milieu represents a caesura with older methods for any number of reasons. In fact, the digital world collides with many standard postmodern themes. Unfortunately, the collision of postmodern theory with the digital world has been presented as unproblematic, especially in volumes such as Debates in the Digital Humanities where one regularly comes across references to discourses, epistemologies, and narratives as if they function no differently in a digital environment.² In a similar spirit, David J. Bodenhamer writes, “the use of appropriately cast spatial technologies … promises to develop a unique postmodern scholarship.”³ Alternatively, scholars present digital research as a practical and straightforward empirical affair. In Digitization in the Real World, the editors note this is “a book written by practitioners for practitioners” on the process of digitization; it is not interested in the interpretive impact.⁴ As a result, little attention has been paid to analytical contradictions in the following domains: the discord between Big Data’s link to positivist methods of the nineteenth century and postmodernism’s basic mistrust of quantification; how digital translation tools have challenged the concept of linguistic incommensurability; the tension between social time of the postmodernists and the universal time which exerts an enormous influence in the digital environment; and the rapid increase in data visuals at the expense of traditional text in humanist scholarship.

All too often the answer to the digital challenge is to look backwards, not forwards. Instead of thinking about how postmodern ideas have to be adjusted to digital realities, the same terms and vocabulary are introduced as a humanist counterthrust to the digital impulse. In her article Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship, Johanna Drucker recognizes the potential danger of the Digital Humanities and stresses that “if we are to assert the cultural authority of the humanities in a world whose fundamental medium is digital,” theories from the humanities must have a critical purchase on digital platforms.⁵ Although this could not be more true, she advocates the promotion of humanistic theories—poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and deconstruction—that were developed more than half a century ago. How can theories developed in the 1960s in a completely different historical environment stand as a bulwark against the excesses of the digital age?

Time and again, there is a reluctance to move on from standard themes and standard vocabularies, as if no matter what happens in the external world, the same postmodern premises can offer an adequate solution. In a commemorative edition of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak downplays the technological revolution. The “cybernetic and infometrics revolution” is dismissed because its revolutionaries “are using not a new discourse to fix the new inventions, but versions of the millennial ethnocentric and Europacentric ideology of the thinking of Europe.” In brackets, she adds, “The World Wide Web works on psychologistic and positivistic reductions of the ideas of text, recovery, memory, access, and especially, interaction.”⁶ The comments are ironic because they appear in the 40th Anniversary edition and give the impression that nothing has changed since the first edition appeared in France. It is not enough to dismiss cybernetics and infometrics with tools that were developed in the middle of the twentieth century. Many of the celebrated aspects of postmodernism are ill-suited to a contemporary world so distant from Paris of the 1960s, where postmodernism first gained momentum.

The digital world is not incommensurable with postmodernism, but one cannot assume that postmodern ideas can operate timelessly in any environment; it as an inherent corollary to postmodernism that its natural force will erode. The accomplishments of postmodernism do not have to be denied, but the achievement must be met with critical eyes to see both where its energies are still vibrant and where the spirit has waned. The energies are best revealed by highlighting the brazen ventures whose lasting impact is not always self-evident. Within the ivory tower and out on the street, postmodern gestures are ubiquitous if often unrecognized, as so much of its accomplishments go unnoticed. There is no contradiction celebrating success as a lifetime achievement award, while recognizing that the recipient is no longer at the summit of her career. It becomes necessary to evaluate those aspects of the canon that demand more urgent change. In the spirit of the idea that every end is a new beginning, the postmodern predilection for language and theory deserves a more critical eye because these positions are nearing their end. The end of the linguistic turn and the end of theory may ring overly dramatic, yet these two crutches of the postmodern generation need a deeper evaluation because they simply cannot exist in the same way in the digital environment.

Digital developments have presented humanists with convenient tools which are shifting basic methodologies and, as a consequence even if yet unspoken, are nibbling away at the underlying premises of postmodernism. For example, the algorithm is a common buzzword, almost an invective at this point, but little effort has been made to examine how basic decision-making processes within an algorithm impact humanist theories. Since humanists have actually started to employ algorithms, the basic principles have to be contextualized relative to older conceptual models. Similarly, the relevance of Big Data requires elucidation in a multifaceted manner. From its basic principles to its modification of concepts of space and time to its visualization in any number of forms, Big Data must be better positioned vis-à-vis postmodernism because to simply accept Big Data is to undermine postmodernism altogether. Conversely, to reject it in favor of a naïve allegiance to postmodernism is to live in an age other than our own. A closer look creates a more congenial atmosphere for the two even if one partner is definitely the elder states-person. In addition to these digital concerns, the discussion is rounded out with words on digital forgeries. Because postmodernism was so concerned with blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, forgery is an exemplary test case that has yet to receive the philosophical attention it merits: what is a digital forgery, and does it have the same authorial and epistemological connotations of art forgeries that have been the subject of such fascination over the years? The subject of forgery, complex in the simplest of times, confirms the old saw that there is always more work to be done. All these issues need elaboration, but the path to clarity must begin by understanding the postmodern achievement, tracing its waning powers, and then examining what happens in the digital age.

Stripped of much of its tedious jargon, postmodernism was at heart a celebration of human diversity and the complex qualities of life: the qualities that fill us with emotion, make us see many colors where previously we saw only one, and distinguish between the sounds in our environments. In this sense it took its lead from Nietzsche, who was truly of the earth, explored all our inner instincts, and situated humans in a world of plants, animals, and diverse geographical terrain. It took a relativistic interpretation from Nietzsche to argue that truths were social constructs, the mind a convenient fiction, and the world a home to fluctuating values.

Practically and indirectly, postmodernism opened the way to accepting cultural achievements. Bypassing Mozart and Beethoven as the standards of excellence, Westerners reluctantly came to realize that other cultures had rather complex musical schemes that produced enjoyable sounds. Instead of viewing African artistic production as magical native crafts, as Picasso did at the ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadéro in the early twentieth century, philosophers of a postmodern persuasion argued that crafts was a derogatory term that denied these cultures an artistic aesthetic.⁷ On the street level, this meant that postmodernism was instrumental in moving non-European artistic creation from museums of natural history to bona fide art museums. Although thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Achievement of Postmodernism
• 3 The End of the Linguistic Turn
• 4 The End of Theory in the Humanities
• 5 The Influence of Algorithms on Humanistic Thought
• 6 Digital Space
• 7 Digital Time
• 8 Data Visuals
• 9 Digital Forgeries
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index