Unbeknownst to me, some of the angst I expressed in my last blog post about unoriginality, the writing process, and blogging is apparently very hip. Stanley Fish, a columnist, or rather, blogger, for the New York Times, and a very established establishment scholar, has started to tackle these topics by looking at “digital humanities” in his column, or rather, blog.
What is digital humanities? Having been out of the English Lit/Theory world for close to 10 (10!) years now, I will take this expert at his word:
“the ‘digital humanities,’ [is] an umbrella term for new and fast-moving developments across a range of topics: the organization and administration of libraries, the rethinking of peer review, the study of social networks, the expansion of digital archives, the refining of search engines, the production of scholarly editions, the restructuring of undergraduate instruction, the transformation of scholarly publishing, the re-conception of the doctoral dissertation, the teaching of foreign languages, the proliferation of online journals, the redefinition of what it means to be a text, the changing face of tenure — in short, everything.”
His next column gets more in depth—digging into what distinguishes traditional humanities from this new digital iteration. Fish starts by contrasting his career, which he’s staked on“building arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive and, most important, all mine,” to blogs, which are “provisional, ephemeral, interactive, communal, available to challenge, interruption and interpolation, and not meant to last.”
The way Fish lays out these differences sheds light on my own desire for originality and my sometimes struggle to write. Trained in this traditional, scholarly, author-based world where unique, well-researched, substantial argument was prized above all else, that is the standard I have continued to hold for myself. Part of what handicaps me from even finishing a paragraph, let alone a poem or an essay, is the sense that it isn’t substantial, comprehensive, or original.
But the “digital humanities” seem to be prizing exactly the opposite qualities. Instead of trying to be singular, the new humanities are part of a community of authorship. Instead of striving for permanence, they are meant to be ever changing. Fish explores all this in depth, so I don’t really need to rehash it. What has caught me off-guard is that I find this new “text in process” that he describes both liberating, and false.
In terms of blog posts, I find great freedom in the idea that the “text” is impermanent, fleeting, and mulit-voiced. I’m able to write most prolifically when I don’t have to work too hard for it, when it’s just my ramblings linked to all kinds of other people’s ramblings. It’s also, actually, quite reassuring to know that with time these posts will simply sink to the bottom of the digital refuse heap: this is their fate no matter how “good” they are, so I don’t have to worry too much about them either way.
Yet when it comes to poems, or works of literature or scholarship, I find this idea of “text in process” contrived and trivializing. I sure hope that my blog does not mirror the fate of all written word. Are Paradise Lost and Romeo and Juliet, Lolita and Blood Meridian to be taken as lightly and discarded as quickly as blog posts in this new era of digital humanities?
I buy that new texts, “blogs, links, hypertext, re-mixes, mash-ups, multi-modalities and much more,” have different rules than traditional ones; that there’s more at play, more voices, perhaps, and more change and immediacy than there used to be. But how different is this than Milton’s allusions to the Bible or Shakespeare’s allusions to Milton? According to Fish, the digital humanities claim to offer a “decentralized author”:
Mark Poster draws the moral: “[T]he shift … to the globally networked computer is a move that elicits a rearticulation of the author from the center of the text to its margins, from the source of meaning to an offering, a point in a sequence of a continuously transformed matrix of signification”
But is this idea new? Didn’t the “myth of the stand-alone author” officially die 90 years ago when Eliot acknowledged the power of tradition over the poet? Isn’t it common sense that the “author” doesn’t write in a vacuum, and yet there is still someone who can take responsibility for putting the words together?
Fish presents the vision of digital humanities as theological and revolutionary, in that they want to overthrow mortality by ridding us of linearity, “of having a beginning, middle and end, which is what sentences, narratives and arguments have.” But doesn’t making sense require some kind of logic, some chain of thought that can be followed? If not, why have I been working on this blog post for 3 days? Why didn’t I just post all the quotations that seemed interesting to me, smushed in between some thoughts at random, and let it all speak for itself?
For me, the heart of the matter is that literature matters. Art matters. And it’s different than a blog. It is longstanding, monumental, and significant. In the words of Carol Quillen during her inauguration as the new president of my alma mater, Davidson College:
“I am a humanities professor. When professors like me read Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ or God’s speech from the whirlwind in the Book of Job, when we read Toni Morrison’s description in Beloved of an African’s experience in a slave ship, or when we recall the opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid, when we watch Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful, or see Romeo and Juliet, or stare at Picasso’s Guernica, or listen to Yo-Yo Ma play Bach’s Cello Suites, when we have these experiences, we are moved. These words and images and sounds reach into us, unsettle and transform us in ways difficult to describe, and we are wiser and stronger because we have opened ourselves to these challenging works of art. And when we communicate to others what we have experienced through our encounters with these works, new knowledge gets produced.”
I don’t have any pretense that my blog is literature, or scholarship, or that it matters. That’s not what it’s meant to be. But I do believe some writing is all that, even in this digital age. It seems obvious to me that some texts last longer than others, that there might be multiple influences and multiple references, that some texts might take on new and challenging structures and change over time, but none of this seems particularly new or revolutionary, and none of it eliminates the existence of significant work that remains important despite the passage of time.
Perhaps all of this new digital humanities jive is just about digital works, not traditional ones. In which case the original contrast (impermanent vs. permanent) stands and makes sense to me. Or are the digital humanities making claims about all humanities? I am curious to see what Fish’s next column/post will be about . . . will he refute the claims of the digital humanities? Will he bolster them? Put them in context?
For now, I will take comfort in the insignificance of this post. I will feel reassured that any attempts at understanding current or past literary theory aren’t serious—for they are not meant to be longstanding nor definitive. This will matter only as long as it’s the first at the top of blog. And for my own sake, I’ll keep trying to figure out what matters most and how to keep stringing words together in a linear fashion so they make sense, even if they are only digital.
Bravo for literature! and art! and lovely poems! that are around for me to read years later.