Technology in Theory and Practice: "Technology and Critique"
Response by Ted Underwood

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

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"The alien is already in here with us"
[On April 2, 2012 the Unit for Criticism held its annual Graduate Student event. This year it was a panel of three graduate students on the topic of Technology in Theory and Practice. Below is the text of a response given by Ted Underwood (English), the first of two posts on the event.]


"Technology and Critique"

Written by Ted Underwood (English)

I’d like to thank the organizers of this event, Mike Black and MC Anderson; also, of course, Lauren Goodlad and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. It is a pleasure to be here to respond to these great papers, and this is an exciting moment to be discussing technology in relation to critical theory.

The papers we heard tonight were extremely diverse. They come from different disciplines, and even from different colleges. Some of them consider technology primarily as an object of study — Mark Keitges looked, for instance, at “designed learning environments” like those designed by Vilém Flusser in order to assess their educational potential. Others considered technology primarily as a means of study: Mel Stanfill was interested in software as a tool that facilitates scholarly inquiry into other topics. Safiya Noble combined both approaches; she is studying the way search technology represents black women and girls, but she also critiqued the tools that are available to carry out that study.

I’m dwelling on the diversity of the papers because diversity of this sort can’t be taken for granted. The very existence of this panel suggests that we collectively believe technology is an emergent theme in the humanities and social sciences; in other words, something is happening now in relation to the topic. But the papers made clear that there is no single thing happening. In fact, our disciplinary home bases may still define what it even means to engage technology as a topic.

For some disciplines, like literary studies or history, this is a relatively new phenomenon and one that has not been easily assimilated. As a result, scholars from those disciplines who engage deeply with digital technology have tended to constitute themselves as an extradisciplinary community that goes by the name “digital humanities.” An extradisciplinary community is much less necessary for scholars in disciplines like communications, where electronic technology has long been a central object of study. I’m drawing attention to these contrasts mainly to emphasize that we’re talking about pragmatic responses to a problem that presents itself differently depending on your social location. There are not, in my opinion, very clear methodological boundaries between media studies, critical code studies, and digital humanities. Intellectually, these are overlapping projects: all of them consider technology at times as an object of study and at times as a means.

Now, in way this is a dull conclusion to reach, because it means that I’m not going to be able to construct a clear taxonomy of different “methodologies” or “schools of thought.” There are real divisions out there: not everyone is enthusiastic about the term “digital humanities,” for instance. But I believe those divisions are at bottom social rather than methodological. If you try to define “digital humanities,” you rapidly discover that it’s a tactical coalition lacking a single methodological center — perhaps best defined by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum as scholarship transmitted by a particular, very lively Twitter network.

Of course there is something self-reflexive about that, because Twitter is itself a technology. So perhaps it is not dull after all to say that these scholarly projects are divided socially rather than by conflicting methodologies. That also means that they are divided in large part by different technologies of scholarly communication. Journals, blogs, Twitter, conferences, unconferences, discipline-specific indexes of secondary literature — are precisely the things that define scholarly communities. So this is a third aspect of technology that needs to be factored into our discussion: technology as an object of study, and as a method of study, but also as a mode of communication that organizes study by defining scholarly institutions. And this third category interestingly complicates what it means to reflect critically on technology.


“Theory” is a slippery word that I hesitate to define. But Alex Reid has usefully observed that when humanists talk about the intersection of “theory” and “technology,” they are often concerned more specifically with “critique,” and especially with a kind of critique that has at its core a monitory or gatekeeping function. In this model, we need critique to decide how much and what kind of technology we should allow into our disciplines. The goal is to distinguish useful kinds of technology from kinds that would coarsen our discourse, making it reductive and positivistic. Imagined in these terms, the value of critique springs from the fact that it can preserve a necessary reflective distance on technology. Possibly other social institutions have already been corrupted by intrumental rationality, but we can still count on critique to watch technology skeptically, and close that gate when necessary.

I imagine that you can see where I’m heading with this. If, as I suggested, our scholarly institutions are already defined by particular technologies of communication, then this model of reflective distance may entail a bit of wishful thinking. Our institutions of critique are already pervaded and shaped by specific technologies — like say, Kritik, the blog on which you're reading this response. The depressing way to put this would be to say: it’s too late to close the gate. The alien is already in here with us, and if you seal that airlock, you’re merely sealing us in with him.

But actually I don’t see this reflection as depressing at all; I see it as opening up an alternative and rather useful model of critique. We might say, I’m here, technology is over there, let me critique it before it gets any closer. But there is also a model of critique closer to hacktivism. I am — we are — already embedded in technological systems, so how might we edit those systems? What tempting points of reflective leverage are opened up by the the technological constitution of our own discourse? How might we tweak the infrastructure to make the game itself more interesting? In this model, the technology pervading scholarly life becomes a handle that gives us a grip on otherwise tricky reflexive problems of self-remaking.

I don’t think we have to make a final choice between these models of critique. All of the papers we heard tonight expressed some concern that technology could be used in reductive or deterministic ways. But all of them were also engaged in a critical project that resembled hacktivism. Mark’s emphasis on reflective design made the hacking dimension of his project very explicit, but I would say that Safiya was also, implicitly, proposing to redesign search technology. Mel is arguably using data analysis software to hack scholarship itself. I would add that scholarly communication is yet another thing we can hack: in reflecting on technology we are opening up a possibility of reshaping our own institutions to become livelier, more innovative, or more equitable. I’m encouraged, for instance, by the scholars who recently organized a boycott of the academic publisher Elsevier to protest its extortionate pricing, and by the scholars at PressForward, who are redesigning peer review to foster a more open and more interactive kind of scholarship.

Of course, imagining critique on the model of hacktivism raises some puzzling questions. As presently constituted, critical theory involves knowledge of a particular intellectual tradition. How would we graft new technological practices onto that tradition? Is it possible to link Michel Foucault to software design — and if we try to do that, won’t contact with the sciences inevitably put us at a disadvantage? Obviously, I can’t offer a full answer to that question in the paragraph that remains. But tonight we heard Mel Stanfill link queer theory to data analysis, and I doubt that roping in The Archaeology of Knowledge would prove any more difficult.

Personally, I suspect that academic humanists have been too diffident in relation to science and technology. We should go ahead and plunge in when necessary, just as we would plunge into a field like sociology if we needed to understand a particular problem. Humanists are smart people; I don’t think we’ll be at any disadvantage. In the domain of text mining, at any rate, my experience has been that the math is not especially difficult. The difficulty comes in interpreting the results. For instance, computer scientists have designed a set of algorithms that do what they call “topic modeling,” but I suspect that these algorithms often identify patterns that are closer to “discourses” than to “topics” in our ordinary sense of the word. In cases like this, the sciences need what we can contribute intellectually. And we, in turn, need them politically. To make critique matter, we are increasingly going to have to crack open some black boxes, figure out how they work or could work, and rebuild them appropriately. It’s a challenge, to be sure, but an exciting challenge, and one that our panelists tonight are already engaging. Read more

The Ends of History: Response from Patrick Bray

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

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Honoré de Balzac by Louis-Auguste Bisson, 1842.
[On February 10, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society for a symposium, The Ends of History. Below are remarks from Patrick Bray, assistant professor of French at the University of Illinois, delivered as part of the symposium's closing roundtable. Prof. Bray's is the second of several responses we hope to publish.]

Written by Patrick Bray (French)

My current book project looks at how the novel, since the birth of the modern concept of literature around 1800, is incapable of incorporating a coherent theory, or a theory of itself, within the text. When a theory is included in a novel, it must obey aesthetic concerns – its relationship to the “outside” of the text is secondary. To take a famous example, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time contains hundreds of “theories” formulated for the most part by the narrator. But the narrator himself is a character who changes over the course of the novel from a boy to a depressed hypochondriac to a writer. How do we assess the validity of any of the novel’s theories when the fictional text itself is unstable?

For the five minutes or so I have today, I’d like to bring up a novel I’m reading at the moment, Balzac’s 1831 The Wild Ass’s Skin, or La peau de chagrin. This is Balzac’s first realist novel – it depicts the political disappointment of the failed revolution of July 1830 and a society that has been corrupted not only by money but by a disconnect between words and deeds. Obviously this is a situation very foreign to all of us. What has always struck me about the novel is that the title character, if you will, is a magic talisman from the Orient. How do you have a credible realist novel that depends so much on a magic skin granting the hero whatever he wishes in return for some of his life force? For the old man who gives the hero the talisman, it represents the mysterious but necessary link between power, knowledge, and desire (Foucault avant la lettre) – in other words it is a fiction that reveals to us how the world works.

In case this seems like too much of a stretch, too close of a reading, you only have to look at Balzac’s prologue where he says that writers have a “second sight” which he calls a sort of talisman that would let them see anything in the world as an inner vision. Close your eyes and travel the world with Balzac. Within the novel, every conceivable theory in every discipline is used to try to explain the magic ass’s skin, and each theory fails. My favorite scene is when three scientists in succession come up short and one of them destroys his lab trying to understand the physical properties of the talisman – I have a fantasy of seeing an MRI explode when a neuroscientist tries to measure the brainwaves of a subject reading Jane Austen.

The point of Balzac’s talisman is not whether it is real or not, what’s its origin might be, but rather what it does, what it allows us to see. By placing a thin slice of unreality within a realist description of Paris, Balzac shows us that the novel presents and then represents reality: it is both historically accurate and a product of the author and the reader’s desires. Scientists, historians, and other positivists who love to read “suspiciously” in order to track down the relationships between power and knowledge, should remember the other term in Balzac’s trilogy, “desire”. The talisman, like literature in general, acts as a concentric mirror, reflecting back at the reader a focused image of his or her own reading desire.

Balzac makes us aware of the complicity between scholarship and techniques of power. Balzac’s novel works because it resists theories, because it puts them to the test and reflects back at the reader her or his own reading desires. How does the push for more quantitative analysis of literary works by digital humanists, as well as the instrumentalization of foreign literature departments into language service departments, share the same managerial tools of control as globalization or neo-colonialism. Franco Moretti, in his influential book Graphs, Maps, and Trees calls literary studies “the most backwards discipline in the academy” and advocates “distant reading” as opposed to close reading (which seems to me like outsourcing reading to computers). I think that literature’s inability to incorporate theory has an effect on the literary scholar who must look outside the literary text in order to justify an argument.


"Reading Girl" by Gustav Adolph Hennig (German, 1797-1869) 
As Jonathan Culler has argued, “theory is work that succeeds in influencing thinking in fields other than those in which it originates” (3). The powerful, talismanic, tools given to us by computers, namely text mining and new forms of collaboration, may certainly lead to new ways of approaching literature as a social phenomenon. But we need to know what is so attractive about a distant or digital approach to reading. Where is the desire to draw graphs, make charts, and plot trajectories coming from? What is it that is so disturbing about close reading, as opposed to a safer, more visual, distant reading? In Les Mots et les choses, Foucault calls literature in the modern épistemè a “counter-discourse,” one that undermines all other scientific discourse. As I have tried to show with Balzac’s novel, the literary text reveals the gap between received knowledge and the impenetrability of the real. Without knowing how to read your own desire, the extra interpretive power provided by a computer, by a metric, is not very useful. As the hero realizes near the end of Balzac’s novel, “Le pouvoir nous laisse tels que nous sommes et ne grandit que les grands.” (276) ("power leaves us as we are and only magnifies the great”). 

In an age obsessed with genetic determinism and the quantification of all human activity, what we need most right now may be a little more close reading… Read more

BIOS: Life, Death, Politics; Campbell and Casarino on Tekhnē and Time-Images
Guest Writer: John Claborn

Sunday, May 2, 2010

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Tom Joslin and Mark Massi, Silverlake Life


[On April 30 and May 1, 2010, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies initiative for a a conference, BIOS: Life, Death, Politics. In the first of a series of guest blogs from the conference, John Claborn writes about the panel featuring papers by Timothy Campbell (Cornell) and Cesare Casarino (U Minnesota).]

Campbell and Casarino on Tekhnē and Time-Images


Written by John Claborn (English)

In his anecdotal preface to the first panel of the Unit for Criticism’s co-organized conference, Bios: Life, Death, Politics, James Hay introduced panelists Timothy Campbell and Cesare Casarino as “Italianists” engaged with Foucault’s College de France lectures of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The presentations by Campbell and Casarino complemented each other well, as each began with an explication of biopolitics (drawing heavily on theorists like Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito) followed by an attempt to theorize potential openings for resistance to modern biopolitical regimes.


Campbell’s paper, “‘Enough of a self’: Thanatos and the Tekhnē of Bios,” first offered a reading of Foucault’s concern with tekhnē in his work on the "Hermeneutics of the Self" and its relation to “modern modes of being subjects.” Foucault, Campbell interprets, advanced a “tragic reading of bios,” in which self-care as a modern mode of subjectivation constricts and captivates bios. Since Greek antiquity, tekhnē has separated from bios and now approaches it no longer as an object but as something to be mastered or “tested” within a “regime of the care of self.” Campbell then proposed a notion of “attention” as a possible mode of resistance to this constrictive regime, seeing attentiveness as a withholding of judgment and negation (i.e. the opposite of “testing”) from the object. A tekhnē of attention “reaches out” to the object not in order to test it, but rather to engage it in “creative play.”

Casarino advanced a notion of the “life-image” based on his reading of Gille Deleuze’s Cinema 2: the Time-Image as a “history” of time’s radical transformation under post-World War II biopolitical production (and reproduction) and post-Fordist capitalism. He showed a clip from the 1993 AIDS documentary Silverlake Life to illustrate the emergence of the life-image out of the “time-image.”

The time-image consists of shots that “express” duration rather than movement (of the camera or of figures in the mise-en-scéne). The documentary shows sequences of “cinematic still-lifes” (devoid of human presence) and various “whatever spaces” that express the alienation of the AIDS victim—the “walking dead,” as the voiceover says—from everyday, biopoliticized life. For Casarino, the life-image is not a representation of life but an “expression” of “enduring” life through the quasi-religious experience of the cinema.

In the discussion afterwards, the audience raised a few questions for Campbell: What is lost by removing “modernity” from the title of the talk (included on the conference schedule, but removed for the actual talk)? What exactly does Foucault mean by “test”? Does this concept need further elaboration and stronger historical grounding?

Some questions I have: how might this notion of “attention” benefit from an engagement with cognitive psychology and neuroscience? And does “attention” as resistance risk a kind of pure formalism reminiscent of Heideggerian authenticity? What is its political, ethical, and historical content?

Some questions for Casarino were also raised: How does the specificity of the video (vs. cinematic) medium in Silverlake Life affect the argument about the life-image? Can the life-image be thought of as emerging out of the “creative play” (tying into Campbell’s talk) of the time-image? What is the relation of the life-image to bare life?

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Samantha Frost: Responding to
"Biopoliticized Maternity and the Trope of Immunization"
3/2 Colloquium with Penelope Deutscher

Thursday, March 5, 2009

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Written by Samantha Frost (Political Science)

In responding to Penelope Deutscher’s Monday presentation, “Biopoliticized Maternity and the Trope of Immunization,” I want to briefly outline the questions and insights that animate her main argument and then offer some questions and observations that, hopefully, may provide the basis for our broader discussion.

Deutscher considers how we might understand the operations of biopower in feminisms in which claims to women’s reproductive rights are articulated in a language or rhetoric that participates in state racism: women must have control over their reproductive lives in order to ensure the vitality of the volk, the people, the racialized nation. Deutscher is interested in tracing how such feminisms participate in the unfolding of biopower. And of course, she finds that Foucault is not much of a direct help in his writings.

Foucault, it turns out, has a blind spot. When he analyzes sexuality, sex, and the biopolitical management of populations, he develops his insightful account of how biopower constitutes subjects, of how biopower’s elaboration forms the basis for resistance that is incorporated into the elaboration of biopower itself. In other words, there is no outside to power; instead we must speak of subjects’ redeployment or redirection of power, a redirection that doesn’t undermine or detract from power but rather enables subjects to use it to their relative advantage even as they become more enmeshed in its tentacles and operations. Now, what Deutscher points out is that when Foucault is confronted with questions about feminism, particularly as feminists have made claims about reproductive rights, he chokes, theoretically. In other words, whereas he talks of resistance to imperatives about sexuality in terms of the complex operations of biopower, he seems unable to draw on that analysis of power in talking of women’s resistance to imperatives vis a vis reproduction. Instead, he reverts to the language of defiance and counter-attack--a language that positions feminists as outside of and countering biopower and not as participating in it.

Deutscher marks this as a curious blindspot in Foucault’s thinking: for all his attention to sex, sexuality, and the biopolitical management of the life of the population, he does not seem to recognize that these turn on women’s reproductive capacities and that therefore the control and management of women’s reproductive lives is necessarily at the center of the operations of biopower.

For intellectual succor, Deutscher turns to Roberto Esposito’s effort to expand the political insights available through Foucault’s account of biopower. Esposito notes that biopolitics--the management and enhancement of life--is inextricably bound up with thanatopolitics--the dispensing and management of death. Indeed, he claims that each is the obverse of the other. However, Foucault and his commentators often disregard the obverse relationship between biopolitics and thanatopolitics, instead favoring analyses that point to either the productive or the destructive elements of biopower. Esposito suggests that the notion of immunity might be helpful to highlight the points of contact between the destructive and maximizing elements of biopower. With the immunity model of power, biopower divides itself, fights against itself, in order to preserve itself.

Deutscher argues that it might be helpful to analyze feminist politics of women’s reproductive rights through the model or trope of immunity. Within this model, as women’s reproductive capacities are harnessed for the purposes of enhancing the vitality of the race/nation, feminists deploy a language of rights and autonomy that is framed in terms of the vitality of the race and nation. Accordingly, feminists’ rights rhetoric participates both in their subjection to biopolitical imperatives as well as in the thanatopolitical designation of the unwanted racial others. It is not clear to me, in Deutscher’s analysis, whether the racialized feminisms are the relevant instance of biopower’s immunitary self-negation (feminism qua protest movement takes a form that serves or protects the biopolitical imperatives of the nation), or whether the racialization of the feminisms is the relevant instance of biopower’s immunitary self-negation (racialization is feminism’s effort to preserve itself in the face of biopolitical imperatives). In other words, insofar as it serves the biopolitical imperatives of the nation, feminists may make demands for women’s reproductive autonomy. Here, the racial other is sacrificed for the sake of the survival of feminism. Or perhaps both these immunitary moments are in play. So a question I have, then, is about where Deutscher locates this immune response.

A second question concerns the close relationship Foucault and Deutscher sketch between women’s reproduction and the racial interests of the state. If women are constituted as political subjects through biopolitical interest in and management of their reproductive capacities, are political claims about reproduction necessarily steeped in forms of racism? Given the analysis Deutscher wants to develop, is it possible to articulate non-racist feminist claims about women’s reproductive rights, or will they always be a reformulation of the racialized terms through which women’s reproductive capacities vehiculate racialized biopolitical imperatives?

A final question I have--it is perhaps more an observation than a question--concerns Esposito’s intention to use the immunitary model of power to develop what he calls an affirmative biopolitics. I have to say I am not yet clear what this might be. Part of me wants to say that it might be seen in those movements in which racialized others--those who are the subjects of thanatopolitics--redeploy the rhetoric of race to make claims for the right to have families--the right to give birth, to reproduce. I am thinking here of Latinas, Native Americans, or African-American women who have been caught up in the longstanding eugenics policies of the US. And of course, since such redeployments are made precisely through the language of race, they are also a retrenchment of biopolitics: are such feminist movements instances in which an immunitary logic of biopower is at play? Would this constitute an affirmative biopolitics (it enhances life as it undermines thanatopoltics)? Or is an affirmative biopolitics, as Esposito also seems to suggest, one in which discourses of reproduction would no longer be enclosed within specific racial bodies, detached from the nation? Might one substitute the vitality of the planet for the vitality of the nation? And if we did so, what difference would that make to women’s efforts to be roughly self-determining with respect to their reproductive life cycle?

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