Remarks on Alan Liu and the Digital Humanities, A Working Paper

William Benzon

April 2014 Abstract: Alan Liu has been organizing and conceptualizing digital humanities (DH) for two decades. I consider a major essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” two interviews, one with Katherine Hayles and the other with Scott Pound, and a major blog post in which Liu engages Stephen Ramsay. Other investigators included: Willard McCarty and Franco Moretti. Some of Liu’s themes: DH as symbolic of the future of the humanities, the need for theory as well as practical projects, the role of DH in enlarging the scope of the “thinkable,” the importance of an engineering mindset, and the need for a long-term effort in revivifying the humanities.

Contents Introduction: The Only Game in Town ...................................................................................... 1 Computer as Symbol and Model: On reading Alan Liu .......................................................... 4 The Thinkable and the Interesting: Katherine Hayles Interviews Alan Liu ......................... 8 Alan Liu: Reengaging the Humanities ..................................................................................... 11 Ring Composition in Alan Liu’s Essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” ......... 14 Shades of the tabula rasa, something’s happening here… .................................................... 18 To Capture Infinity in a Bottle: The Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism .............. 21

bbenzon@mindspring.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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Introduction: The Only Game in Town Computation has theoretical consequences—possibly, more than any other field of literary study.

The time has come, to make them explicit. –Franco Moretti

I first heard about Alan Liu back in the late 1990s, when he was working on Voice of the Shuttle. I may or may not have submitted some links, I don’t really remember, but if so, that would have been it. Since then I gather that he’s been acting as a Johnny Appleseed for what has come to be called digital humanities, an ambassador, or in the corporate jargon of Apple Inc., an evangelist. But it wasn’t until early in 2012 that I started to focus on the so-called digital humanities (aka DH). To be sure, Matt Kirschenbaum showed up at The Valve1 (alas, now dormant) for the Moretti book event (Graphs, Maps, Trees)2 and, for that matter, Moretti himself put in a few appearances. I snagged a promising book reference from Kirschenbaum (Dominic Widdows, Geometry and Meaning3), but for me that event was about Moretti, not DH. It took Stanley Fish to get me thinking about DH. He’d gone to the MLA convention, attended some DH sessions, and blogged about it in January, 2012: Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation.4 Of my posts tagged “digital humanities”, only a bit less than a quarter of them were written before Fish. The rest come after. Sometime in the wake of Fish I came across anxiety within the DH community about the lack of Theory, with Alan Liu prominent among the worriers. Now I was irritated. On the one hand, it seems to me that Theory has lost most of its energy – for what it’s worth, it was an examination of that morbidity that had attracted me to The Valve (the discussions of Theory’s Empire5) in the summer of 2005. On the other hand, there’s a rich body of theory around computation, language, the mind, and evolutionary process (read: history) which is relevant, it seemed to me, to DH and yet which has been for the most part neglected. Finally, in March of this year I saw a video of Liu’s “Meaning of the Humanities”6 talk at NYU. I watched it, liked it, and contacted Alan. He responded by sending me a PDF of his PMLA article of the same title (“The Meaning of the Digital Humanities”, PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423). That prompted me to write the first of the blog posts I’ve collected here: Computer as Symbol and Model: On reading Alan Liu. Liu begins and ends his PMLA article with the figure of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralism was “a midpoint on the long modern path toward understanding the world as system” (p. 418). If understanding world as system is included in the remit of DH, then I’m on board. In between his invocations of Lévi-Strauss Liu manages to argue against the notion that “there are immaculately separate human and machinic orders” (p. 416). I’m down with that too. And so it went. When I posted the piece I figured that one post would be it. I was wrong. I nosed about in some other Liu materials and decided to blog some more. 1 http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/poetry_patterns_and_provocation_the_nora_project/ 2 http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/archive_asc/C48 3 http://www.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/site/1575864487.shtml 4 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/mind-your-ps-and-bs-the-digital-humanities-and-interpretation/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 5 http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/archive_asc/C41 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IrvUys_STcs

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In my next post, The Thinkable and the Interesting: Katherine Hayles Interviews Alan Liu, I latch onto Liu’s belief that DH should be fostering new modes of though by making the invisible and the obscure thinkable in new ways. I’ve got two things on my mind in Alan Liu: Reengaging the Humanities. The first is a sense of building, prompted by Liu’s remark that he’s the son of an engineer. Building is very important, not only in the sense of technical infrastructure that digital humanists are building, but also in the sense of poesis: literary works, works of art in general, are constructed, built, composed (to borrow a term from Latour). If we are to understand them more deeply, we need to describe and examine the relevant principles of construction. Second, Liu understands that revivifying the humanities is not simply a matter of coming up with new rhetorical moves we can stuff into new defenses of the humanities that we crank out by the 100s. It’s going to be a long-term process in which we reconstruct our institutions. The next post–Ring Composition in Alan Liu’s Essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities”–is something different. Rather than interrogate Liu’s ideas I examine his rhetoric, not to unmask anything, not to show any sneaky hidden agenda, but simply to display how that essay works. Normally I do that sort of thing with literary texts and movies, but Liu’s deployment of Lévi-Strauss fore and aft got me wondering: Is this a ring-form text? It turns out that it is. At the structural center Liu has placed the concept of a tabula rasa interpretation, where the interpreter is a machine, not a human. That is enclosed before and after by Liu’s discussion of a particular example of digital criticism and that triplet is, in turn, enclosed by general discussions of DH, each marked by a reference to Lévi-Strauss. The next post returns us to the examination of ideas, and in a form that I particularly like, the open letter: Shades of the tabula rasa, something’s happening here… I now take the idea of a tabula rasa interpretation and place it in the context of some of Stanley Fish’s early displeasure with “machine” reading, though the machines in Fish’s case aren’t necessarily computers. At least one of them, Michael Halliday, is a human who happens to go about his business in a (superficially) mechanistic way (he’s a linguist). That brings us to my last post, To Capture Infinity in a Bottle: The Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism, which I stage as a colloquy among four digital humanists, Liu, Willard McCarty, Stephen Ramsay, and Franco Moretti. Each is speaking for the need to go beyond building digital infrastructure for humanists and providing digitally enhanced record keeping and number crunching. All argue that DH needs some kind of sui generis theoretical enterprise if it is to flourish. I cannot but agree and, as I indicated above, I have some thoughts about that. And that brings me to my theme. I agree with Moretti, computing has theoretical consequences, and they make digital criticism the hottest game in town. Right now it’s the only approach that’s turning up something new. Some of the newness is infrastructural, necessary, but not itself a source of intellectual innovation and renewal. But those diagrams that investigators are creating, they betoken new ways of thinking. Those diagrams are ways of capturing heretofore-invisible phenomena within the humanistic field. As far as I can tell, no one else is doing that. No one else is going into the territories where dragons dwell. The literary cognitivists ought to be venturing there, but they’re not. The so-called cognitive revolution is what happened when the idea of computation rippled through psychology, linguistics, and philosophy in the 1950s, 60s’ and on into the 70’s. Not only was the computer used to perform infrastructure tasks, but it was also adopted as a model for the mind. Though some took the model more literally than others, however it was employed, it made mind and mental processes thinkable in new ways. Once the first generation of cognitivists had rehabilitated the concept of mind–the behaviorists had banned it–later researchers were able to think about the mind

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without employing the any of the concepts of computation. And that’s where the literary cognitivists have set up camp. The upshot is that much of their work is old wine in new bottles. The same is true for their cousins the literary Darwinists. Evolutionary psychology was made possible through the application of game theory to animal behavior. Game theory was invented by John von Neumann, the mathematician who was also one of the seminal theorists of computation. But the literary Darwinists are no more interested in computation than the cognitivists. Same story: old wine, new bottles. Will digital criticism rise to Moretti’s provocation and follow out the implications of computation? I don’t know. There is, however, a critical difference between DH and both literary cognitivism and literary Darwinism. While the cognitivists and the Darwinists know, in the way that active investigators know such things, that there is more to be done; they seem pretty content with their current tool set. Not only do digital humanists know that there is more to be done, in the way that scholars know such things; they also sense that something vital is missing. That sense of lack bodes well for the future. We shall see.

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Computer as Symbol and Model: On reading Alan Liu I’ve now had a chance to read Ala Liu’s essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” (PMLA 128, 2013, 409-4237) and have some thoughts about the way he stages computing. In this post I want to follow the outer edges of his argument in an effort to situate myself in his discursive field. Let’s start with this early passage (p. 410):

For the humanities, the digital humanities exceed (though they include) the functional role of instrument or service, the pioneer role of innovator, the ensemble role of an “additional field,” and even such faux-political roles assigned to new fields as challenger, reformer, and (less positively) fifth column. This is because the digital humanities also have a symbolic role. In both their promise and their threat, the digital humanities serve as a shadow play for a future form of the humanities that wishes to include what contemporary society values about the digital without losing its soul to other domains of knowledge work that have gone digital to stake their claim to that society.

I think that’s right. I also think that assigning the digital humanities a symbolic role is a clever and crucial bit of staging, for it places digital humanities at the distance Liu needs to treat them as an object requiring interpretation. And interpretation has been the central activity of literary studies for the last half-century or so. We know how to interpret things. But I want to narrow the scope a little. What interests me is not the digital humanities as symbol, but the computer and computing and, I would suggest, that’s what is all but consumes Liu’s attention in this essay. The computer as symbol is quite familiar to many humanists, for computers, robots, and other artificial beings figure centrally in many of the texts we examine. There the computer generally functions as an Other, often malevolent. Liu wisely chooses to ground his inquiry in a specific example, Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac’s A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method (May 2012, 68 page PDF8), which I’ve previously discussed on New Savanna, From Telling to Showing, by the Numbers.9 There are two reasons he chose this paper. In the first place, it is methodologically sophisticated, state of the art as they say. Second, Heuser and Le-Khac arrive at a tentative conclusion about those 2958 texts that is meaningful in traditional humanistic terms, terms argued by Raymond Williams. That allows Liu to examine just how they were able to wrestle meaning from a computer. He quotes Heuser and Le-Khac as asserting (p. 411): “The general methodological problem of the digital humanities can be bluntly stated: How do we get from numbers to meaning?” Numbers are the domain of the computational Other while meaning is in the domain of the human. That’s one opposition. After a bit of discussion Liu introduces another opposition (p. 414):

7 http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/the-meaning-of-the-digital-humanities/ 8 http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet4.pdf 9 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/10/from-telling-to-showing-by-numbers.html

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They help advance an important, general digital humanities goal that might be called tabula rasa interpretation—the initiation of interpretation through the hypothesis-free discovery of phenomena.

The opposition is between “interpretations” (my scare quotes) the computer generates purely algorithmically vs. results obtained when the investigator somehow specifies semantic content the algorithms are to look for. At this point I detect hints of humanistic background radiation in which “tabula rasa interpretation” is posited as a prelapsarian mode of inquiry vs. the sinfulness of hypothisizing driven by human desire. Just as Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise, so in the digital humanities the “goal is to banish...human ideation at the formative onset of interpretation” (I used the ellipsis to fig-leaf the phrase “or at least crucially delay”). Continuing on, Liu asserts:

However, tabula rasa interpretation puts in question Heuser and Le-Khac’s ultimate goal, which is to get from numbers to humanistic meaning (“qualitative arguments and insights about humanistic subjects—culture, literature, art, etc.”). It is not clear epistemologically, cognitively, or socially how human beings can take a signal discovered by machine and develop an interpretation leading to a humanly understandable concept unless that signal (in order to be recognized as a signal at all) contains a coeval conceptual origin that is knowable in principle...

Now Liu is ready to mount an argument demonstrating that Heuser and Le-Khac’s tabula rasa wasn’t, in fact, blank. It was already written upon. As Liu advances that argument he (quite properly) invokes science and technology studies (p. 416):

I invoke especially the postmodern branch of STS (e.g., Feyerabend; Latour; Pickering), whose “against method” view of science (especially in its weird relations with technology) is that any quest for stable method in understanding how knowledge is generated by human beings using machines founders on the initial fallacy that there are immaculately separate human and machinic orders, each with an ontological, epistemological, and pragmatic purity that allows it to be brought into a knowable methodological relation with the other—whether a relation of master and slave, cause and effect, agent and instrument, or another.

There we have it; it is a fallacy to believe that “there are immaculately separate human and machinic orders.” Whatever the central problem of the digital humanities is, it isn’t that of getting from the order of numbers (res extensa?) to the utterly different order of meaning (res cogitans?). Rather, Liu suggests that (p. 416) “digital humanities method—converging with, but also sometimes diverging from, scientific method—consists in repeatedly coadjusting human concepts and machine technologies until ... the two stabilize each other in temporary postures of truth that neither by itself could sustain.” Allowing for general differences in intellectual outlook and background, I have no problem with that. The world does not consist of utterly different machinic and human orders and the construction of knowledge in many domains does in fact consist of “coadjusting human concepts and machine technologies.” How could it be otherwise? The fact is, I negotiated my truce with the machinic order years ago, when I decided to throw in my lot with the nascent cognitive sciences. Just what cognitive science is has always been somewhat vague and fuzzy, if not problematic. But the central enabling conception has been that we can conceive of the (human) mind as come kind of computer. To be sure, cognitive scientists used the computer as a tool to crunch data and run experimental apparatus, but above all they used it as a model of the mind.

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We can even use computers as a means of simulating mental processes, albeit in carefully proscribed ways Some have even believed that the model is so very good that one day we’ll be able to build an actual mind or, in a different version, one day mind will spontaneously arise out of computer. That last claim/hope/dream is, of course, something that humanists interrogate when they consider the computer-as-symbol. What has struck me is that the digital humanists I’ve read seem utterly uninterested in the computer as model of the mind. As a tool, yes. As a model, no. I suspect that disinterest in mostly casual in the sense that the technical tools one uses in modeling the mind in computational terms are not directly useful in their examination of texts. But I suspect that some of this disinterest is strategic; thinking about computing as a model for the human mind is institutionally dangerous. In the context of widespread humanistic suspicion of technology, using computational tools for anything more “invasive” than word-processing and email is more than many of their colleagues can countenance. Swimming against that tide is difficult enough. But to actually think about the mind as some kind of computer, that’s going over to the Dark Side. There be dragons. And yet, one might argue that we have always already been there, or, if not always, at least since World War II. Consider a fascinating article by Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus” (Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2011: 96-126). He looks at the period during and immediately after World War II when Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan picked up ideas about information theory and cybernetics from American thinkers at MIT and Bell Labs. While the American thinkers were elbow deep in practical problems–sending signals through wires, guiding anti-aircraft guns, among them–they also saw their concepts as ways of thinking about the human mind. And it was the mind that interested Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan and those who followed on them. And so we return to Alan Liu (pp. 418-419):

It is not accidental, I can now reveal, that at the beginning of this essay I alluded to Le ́vi-Strauss and structural anthropology. Structuralism is a midpoint on the long modern path toward understanding the world as system (e.g., as modes of production; Weberian bureaucracy; Saussurean language; mass, media, and corporate society; neoliberalism; and so on) that has forced the progressive side of the humanities to split off from earlier humanities of the human spirit (Geist) and human self to adopt a worldview in which, as Hayles says, “large-scale multicausal events are caused by confluences that include a multitude of forces . . . many of which are nonhuman.” This is the backdrop against which we can see how the meaning problem in the digital humanities registers today’s general crisis of the meaningfulness of the humanities. The general crisis is that humanistic meaning, with its residual yearnings for spirit, humanity, and self—or, as we now say, identity and subjectivity—must compete in the world system with social, economic, science-engineering, workplace, and popular-culture knowledges that do not necessarily value meaning or, even more threatening, value meaning but frame it systemically in ways that alienate or co-opt humanistic meaning.

We have always already been there. By way of ending, though not concluding, I would like to invoke one of those pop-culture knowledges. For the last several years I’ve been investigating Japanese manga and anime. Judging from those stories the Japanese have a somewhat different concern about computers than we do. One of the central figures in Japanese popular

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culture is Osamu Tezuka’s Mighty Atom (Astro Boy in the English-speaking world). Atom is an extraordinary robot who makes his way in a world of humans and robots in the form of a ten or eleven year old boy. The central theme in many of those stories is civil rights for robots (see my post The Robot as Subaltern: Tezuka’s Mighty Atom10). The themes of hyper-rationality and lack of affect that are so central to Western stories of computers and robots are at best secondary in these Japanese stories. Does Japanese popular culture have something to teach Western humanists about the place of computer technology in the world?

10 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/12/robot-as-subaltern-tezukas-mighty-atom.html

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The Thinkable and the Interesting: Katherine Hayles Interviews Alan Liu Back in October of 2008 Katherine Hayles interviewed Alan Liu about the use of digital technology in the humanities. That interview is one of 20 Hayles conducted for How We Think and which are on the web.11 I’m particularly interested in Liu’s remarks here and there on “thinkability” and what people find interesting. Liu wonders why, for example, when online publication allows for multimedia texts, most online scholarship is fairly traditional in form and presentation. This particular topic takes off from the online journal Liu has worked with since the previous millennium, Postmodern Culture.12 The following remarks are relatively early in the 50 minute interview (my transcription):

6:05: Hayles: Have you seen a kind of real evolution in the kind of articles submitted to your journal? That is, do you see many more multi-media projects? 6:20: Liu: On the whole I’d have to say “No.” Obviously there has been some of that, and there are journals like Vectors that have emerged recently and have tried to promote that kind of thinking. But it’s really quite amazing that the profession as a whole has been pretty conservative and resistant to the sorts of things that you can now do and that I think would be wonderful if more people did, and that I’d really like to see. I love to see stuff like that come into the journal more often. It does appear but for people to be doing serious thinking and scholarship in a new mode, that simply takes a lot more than I guess 10 or 15 years to actually happen. It does happen, but ask yourself when was the last time you’ve written an essay that requires the new technology in a way that couldn’t be done in a print journal. 7:30: Hayles: In your view is the bottleneck in people’s concern whether these multimedia works would be accepted by their evaluation committees or do you think it goes to what people want to produce? 7:45: Liu: Probably neither. It’s certainly not the former. I think it’s closer to the latter. But it really has to do with how they think and how they can think and what they know how to think and what appears as an interesting thought. My experience from the beginning has been that while there was a lot of chatter about whether electronic documents would be accepted for promotion and tenure cases and so on, this was never a problem. We never heard from anyone that they were turned down or that some entry in their CV was discredited because it was published by a peer review journal that happened to be online. Just the contrary. People were very consistent in having good experiences about it.

11 http://howwethink.nkhayles.com/interviews/ 12 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/

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But I think it’s very hard, despite much talk about a move to a digital culture and a different way of thinking and so on, and despite the sort of stronger versions of Kittlerian and McLuhanesque arguments about the relationship between thought and technology, it simply seems that it takes longer to, than so far we’ve experienced, to move to a new way of thinking because we have these new technologies. It may be that you can – I know you’ve made some of these arguments yourself – can look at traditional technologies, like print, and see how the thought expressed in them now features or is influenced by a new kind of culture, new technologies. I can see that and I think that’s a fair claim and it goes to topics like attention and organization much more so than the nature of the actual object that’s produced.

That last distinction – between attention and organization on the one hand and “the nature of the actual object that’s produced” on the other – is crucial. That’s what speaks to “what they know how to think and what appears as an interesting thought.” And that’s certainly what interests me. What is thinkable now that wasn’t thinkable 10, 20, or 30 years ago? I don’t know how much weight Liu meant to place on the distinction between thinkability and interestingness, but I think it’s an important distinction. Something can be thinkable, but not interesting. In particular, I’ve written quite a bit about the nature of and need for better descriptive13 work in literary studies, but that work isn’t going to be done unless people find it interesting. It’s not that I regard such descriptive work to be the final resting point of inquiry but rather, it is just difficult and sufficiently time-consuming that it won’t be done unless people find it interesting in itself. In two recent working papers, Two Disciplines in Search of Love14 (pp. 8-12) and Corpus Linguistics for the Humanist15 (pp. 13-15) I’ve argued that some of the techniques of the digital humanities have increased the conceptual range of humanistic thinking by creating new forms of description implying new objects of description. But will these newly thinkable objects prove interesting to humanists? Consider these remarks, which are considerably later in the interview and which focus on the question of meaning:

37:49: Hayles: Just to ruffle your feathers a little I’d like to mention a quote that Tim Lenoir came up with during my interview with him. He’s been working on large data-mining projects on patent applications to determine when one can spot the emergence of a new technology platform. And as a historian of science of course this is very interesting to him. But his kind of quip was “Forget meaning; follow the data streams.” I wonder...you’re making precisely the opposite argument, but the reason I’m juxtaposing with what you just said is that, is it possible that our encounter, engagement with digital technologies will actually begin to shift some of those foundational assumptions that you were just articulating? 38:54: Liu: No question, it’s certainly possible. He has a lot of allies. And I think from my perspective the question is why is that so appealing? what is the powerful desire that we feel to move away from interpretation, and from theory, and to get into data streams instead of asking those kinds of interpretation questions about data streams? But maybe I’m going to be

13 This link will take you to my blog posts about description: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/description 14 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2335932 15 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2295639

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in the minority asking that question in a few years because of that attraction of those lines of thought.

That is, these digital humanists find something interesting that is not so interesting to Liu himself. While some things are newly thinkable, these new objects of thought are interesting to some, but not to others. Note however that these new objects of thought weren't brought about by a change in presentation medium. They've been brought about by the adoption of new tools and methods for working with the raw materials of humanistic inquiry: texts. Liu continues on:

Some of the people I’ve mentioned, and one can add some of Deleuze’s work, oddly enough, and others, have really prepared the way for this kind of anti-interpretive, anti-hermeneutic, anti-phenomenological line of thought. And there just is a huge desire to think this way. It’s fair to ask why we have this desire. And I think some of the historical work you have done has also shown where some of that has come from, like the work on the Macy conferences [on cybernetics? – WLB] as being the origin of the disarticulation of meaning from information. Can there be information that doesn’t have meaning? Is there really information there, or does information already assume a degree of implicit or explicit understanding. Do we want a culture of fact, so-called, without interpretation? Can there be such a thing? As a post-modernist I don’t believe that there are neutral facts, a culture of things without thought. What we’ve tried to do is not put the two in conversation but to produce models in which language and thing become one thing, become indistinguishable. That’s one of the dangers of the pull and the power of the metaphor, if you use your term, the homologies, to use mine, of digital environment in relation to thought.

Given Liu’s recent essay, The Meaning of the Digital Humanities (PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423), which I discuss above, I wonder if he might reconsider these remarks. To be sure, what made that article work is that Liu chose an example (Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method) where the investigators themselves made the leap to meaning, but much of the article was devoted to explaining the methodology required to obtain a result interpretable in (traditional) humanistic terms. It’s not at all clear to me that the work would have been done if the investigators hadn’t found it intrinsically interesting and satisfying.

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Alan Liu: Reengaging the Humanities Alan Liu week continues at New Savanna. Now I want to look at an interview he gave to Scott Pound at Amodern: Reengaging the Humanities.16 While the interview is worthwhile in its entirety I’ll select passages where Liu’s thinking (usefully) intersects with my own. First, though, I want cite a biographical passage which speaks to attitude. While talking about Bruno Latour’s interrogation of critique in the name of compositionalism Liu informs us that he’s “the son of a structural engineer and descended from a whole clan who were allowed to immigrate to the U.S. because they were engineers and builders.” Yes. And I’m the son of a chemical engineer who spent his professional career in the coal business.17 Engineering is about designing things and building them. I used “Speculative Engineering” as the title for the preface to my book on music (Beethoven’s Anvil) because I wanted to emphasize the constructive nature of my enterprise. I talked about the building blocks I played with as a child and posed the question: “How does the nervous system design and construct music?” (xiii). I think about literary texts and systems of texts in the same way: How are they built? Returning to Liu, he has quite a bit to say about critique and compositionism. Note his use of engineering language in the following passage:

Critique and compositionism are best understood as arcs in a common cycle of thought, whether at the level of individual projects or of longer generational agendas. Think of it this way: in any project there are tactically important moments when critique is constructive, e.g., at the beginning when assessing what is wrong with precedents or in the middle after the first prototype. Equally, there are tactically shrewd moments when composited methods and viewpoints are constructive, e.g., when the architect pitches a project to a client and has to incorporate the client’s views, when the architect then has to adjust plans in response to the structural engineer, and when the engineer subsequently has to adjust plans in response to the contractors, not to mention the tactically decisive construction workers who actually wield the hammers). It’s just that neither critique nor compositionism has a right to rule as the “last word” in the process–the terminal stage, the end result, the payoff, the final record. In the humanities, I feel, we have fallen into the rut of thinking that interpretive discourse (e.g., a critical essay) should be the final statement of a project, and, further, that critique should be the final payoff of interpretation. [Emphasis mine, WLB] But what if we were to position interpretive discourse and critique elsewhere in the cycle of thought that goes into a project? Compositionism would then not be antithetical to critique; it would include the arc of critique, and vice versa, as part of the rolling launch of thought.

Perhaps we should remind ourselves that the primacy of interpretation is a relatively recent development in our disciplinary history, mostly post World War II, and that

16 http://amodern.net/article/the-amoderns-reengaging-the-humanities/ 17 http://truthandtraditionsparty.org/2011/04/01/my-father-cleaned-coal-for-a-living/

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literary culture managed to function for centuries without a guild of professional interpreters. Liu is quite clear that reengaging the humanities is a long-term effort that involves far more than refitting old defenses of the humanities:

Engaging, or reengaging, the public to make a persuasive case for the value of the humanities will need to be a long campaign over many generations – a far longer time horizon than the longest typical time line for activism in the contemporary humanities (going back to May 1968). Second, I say “reengaging” in the sentence above because the issue of how the humanities should present themselves to society is part of a broader theme today: the great change in how institutional expertise of many kinds (e.g., in higher education, cultural or heritage institutions, journalism, government) engage with the new public networked knowledge (exemplified by Wikipedia or the blogosphere). There is no longer a one way flow in which experts send their knowledge to the public (mediated by journalism and other agencies) while the public sends back only mute feedback in the form of tax dollars, tuition, subscriptions, membership fees, and so on. The flow is increasingly bidirectional or multidirectional. Presenting the humanities afresh to the public today will mean helping to create the new institutional structures, practices, incentives, discourses, and technologies needed for reinventing the role of expertise in the world.

That is to say, we need to rethink our institutions and, in particular, we need to invite the public in. I note that fan culture is all over the place on the Internet, from such general sites as the Wikipedia and TV Tropes18 to sites devoted to specific titles and sites for fan faction. These are obvious points of application for literary scholars.

(See for example my various posts on citizen science19 and my very brief remarks, Crowd-Sourcing Descriptive Work, in Some examples of description.20)

Concerning graduate training, Liu remarks: I know so many humanities graduate students who are not only passionate about public issues but build that passion into their research topics. After all, that is where much of cultural criticism; race, ethnic, and gender studies; postcolonial studies; and now anti-neoliberalist studies, as well as other vibrant movements, come from, not to mention all our “theoretical” allegories (e.g., “rhizomatics”) mirroring our drive (at least as expressed in its modern Western form, with allowance for alternative understandings of the pursuit of happiness elsewhere) for human emancipation and equality. The self-interest of the humanities, I thought, would be served by creating a training path – not just courses or informal colloquia, but perhaps also extramural internship and other opportunities – for our best, brightest, and most passionate students to act on their activism in a way that blends formal education and public engagement.

18 http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage 19 Blog posts on citizen science: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/citizen%20science 20 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/10/some-example-descriptions-two-poems.html

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I don’t know quite what Liu has in mind here – and perhaps he doesn’t either – but I’ve blogged a number of posts under the rubric “JC Rising”21 (where “JC” stands for Jersey City) suggesting local points of application around gardening and public murals. There’s a lot of very interesting grass roots activity in Jersey City that, I suspect, would play well with the kind of training that Liu is suggesting. In particular, I note that Jersey City is minority white and culturally diverse, with a relatively large Spanish-speaking population and many immigrants from East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Finally, Liu has some interesting remarks on what he calls “network archaeology.” Here I’m a bit puzzled, in part I’m quite familiar with certain kinds of network structures – conceptual networks, neural networks – and I’ve got intuitions from that work that do not quite know how engage with Liu’s formulations. Let me offer one statement by Liu and a few comments:

First, treat individual works of media as proto- or micro-networks. This means that we shouldn’t treat documents (or, for that matter, people) as en bloc entities engaging each other in networks but should instead adopt a radically networked worldview in which it’s networks all the way down. En bloc entities – individual documents or people constituted internally as relationships of parts, levels, and stages linking and unlinking in time – are themselves network structures.

Networks everywhere. Sure. But I worry about reification. One can draw network diagrams and use those diagrams to represent lots of different kinds of things. But there may be other ways of representing those things as well. Don’t confuse the (descriptive) notation with the thing itself. Finally, to ride another intellectual hobbyhorse, I suspect that a lot of what Liu is talking about under the rubric of networks could be conceptualized as evolutionary and population processes, but in the cultural domain rather than the biological. Still, think of the biological domain as a source of concepts for thinking about worlds within worlds where you have a large number of entities interacting in many and diverse ways over a wide variety of scales in time and space. Liu begins his final paragraph by noting “I don’t think there can be a place for the humanities in a networked world without any sense of history; and the world would be the worse for it.” Yes. And, biology is a deeply historical discipline, being very much about how the living world not only changes in time but whose very being is deeply entwined with time.

21 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/JC%20Rising

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Ring Composition in Alan Liu’s Essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” I would like to conclude Alan Liu week at New Savanna by returning to the point where I began, his essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” (PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423). As I was writing that original post I was struck by a paragraph-opening sentence near the end: “It is not accidental, I can now reveal, that at the beginning of this essay I alluded to Le ́vi-Strauss and structural anthropology.” The sentence clearly states that Liu did something at the beginning of the essay so as to set us up for something coming at the end. There’s nothing unusual in that; skillful, and even not so skillful, writers do that sort of thing all the time. But Liu’s telling us about his rhetorical slight of hand? Why? I don’t know and, to be honest, that particular question only just now occurred to me as I’m writing this post. What struck me a week ago when I pasted that sentence into my post and then reread it was the possibility that Liu’s article was an example of ring-composition22 – which, you may know, is one of my interests. While I first learned about ring forms in a 1976 article by R. G. Peterson, Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature (PMLA 91, 3: 367-375) it was the late Mary Douglas who got me to think seriously about ring-forms; she devoted her final book to them, Thinking in Rings: An Essay in Ring Composition (Yale 2007). But that was about literary texts of one sort or another. Douglas was particularly interested in Old Testament texts, but had also worked on Tristram Shandy; others were interested in the Homeric texts; I’ve been most interested in films, most recently Gojira (Godzilla),23 a 1954 Japanese film. But Liu’s essay is not a literary text, nor a religious one. No one to my knowledge has investigated ring composition in expository prose. So, why would such a question arise in the case of Liu’s essay? Well, consider what is generally meant by ring-form. Such texts generally a form like this: A, B, … X … B’, A’. So, let us substitute “Levi-Strauss” for A in that structural pattern:

Lévi-Strauss, B, … X … B’, Lévi-Strauss’ If Liu’s essay follows that pattern then I need to find something that’s structurally central and at least one pair of elements that are closely related to one another where one comes before and the other after the structural center. It wasn’t difficult to meet those conditions. Once Liu had concluded a survey of the intellectual environs of the digital humanities, conduced under the aegis of Lévi-Strauss, he devoted the long middle-stretch of the essay to analyzing a particular example, a pamphlet by Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac. In the process of explaining their method, he mentions that it involved “an important adjustment step” which he’s going to skip at the moment, but which he’ll return to later. So:

L-S, adjustment, … X … adjustment’, L-S’

22 See my post, The Ring-Form Challenge: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-ring-form-challenge.html 23 Ring-Form Opportunity No. 4: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/12/ring-form-opportunity-no-4-gojira-is.html

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Now all we need is X. And that’s obvious: “...an important, general digital humanities goal that might be called tabula rasa interpretation—the initiation of interpretation through the hypothesis-free discovery of phenomena.” So we have:

L-S, adjustment, tabula rasa, adjustment’, L-S’ The importance of the so-called tabula rasa interpretation is that it is innocent of human intervention. The computer is finding something in the text unmediated by human desire. However, Liu observes (p. 414):

However, tabula rasa interpretation puts in question Heuser and Le-Khac’s ultimate goal, which is to get from numbers to humanistic meaning... Thus the immense importance of the adjustment step in Heuser and Le-Khac’s method that I earlier elided. In fact, Heuser and Le-Khac used Correlator by itself to produce only initial word cohorts and not finished semantic fields because they realized that they needed to ensure that their cohorts had a semantic consistency that quantitative correlation alone could not offer.

Liu then goes on to explain that adjustment step (p. 415): They turned to the remarkable Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (2009; hereafter HTOED), which had just been published, and borrowed its historical semantic classifications through what they call “a dialogic method that drew on both quantitative historical data and qualitative semantic rubrics to construct semantic fields with precision and nuance...” ...the HTOED required human beings over decades to write down individual words from the OED on paper slips with meanings, usage dates, and sparse metadata, then to sort, bundle, and file the slips in conceptual groupings and hierarchies.

In other words, this project has been mediated by human intervention through and through. As Liu goes on to note (p. 415):

By installing the HTOED as what amounts to a plug-in for Correlator, Heuser and Le-Khac sowed their hermeneutical process with a coseed of human semantic interpretation. They thus “solved” the meaning problem only by deftly turning the aporia between tabula rasa quantitative interpretation and humanly meaningful qualitative interpretation into its own apparent solution...

The fact that Heuser and Le-Khac’s tabula isn’t in fact rasa is not something that Liu sees as problematic. On the contrary, Liu tells us, it is precisely because the slate was never blank that we can read meaningful results from it. That takes care of the apparent ontological difference between numbers and meaning. In Liu’s reading “digital humanities method — converging with, but also sometimes diverging from, scientific method — consists in repeatedly coadjusting human concepts and machine technologies until ... the two stabilize each other in temporary postures of truth that neither by itself could sustain.” The rhetorical point of putting the notion of a tabula rasa interpretation at the essay’s structural center is to put the problematic of man and machine in its starkest form, one where man is effectively replaced or displaced by the machine. When he then shows us that what actually

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happens isn’t as it had seemed we are relieved. Perhaps these digital humanists aren’t so different from us after all. What then of pulling Lévi-Strauss out of the hat at the end? Just before doing so and by way of moving away from his meditation on Heuser and Le-Khac, Liu quotes a passage from Katherine Hayles:

The further one goes along the spectrum that ends with “machine reading,” the more one implicitly accepts the belief that large-scale multicausal events are caused by confluences that include a multitude of forces interacting simultaneously, many of which are nonhuman. . . . If events occur at a magnitude far exceeding individual actors and far surpassing the ability of humans to absorb the relevant in- formation, however, “machine reading” might be a first pass toward making visible patterns that human reading could then interpret. (29)

That, of course, is just what we’ve seen in Heuser and Le-Khac’s analysis of almost 3000 British novels spread out over the 19th century – not only all those books, but all the people who read them and the people they interacted with and the various organizations, institutions, and states (not just Great Britain) associated with them. Heuser and Le-Khac used computing to find a pattern in that collection of texts and then interpreted that pattern in terms they found in Raymond Williams. So, Liu has used Hayles to provide a general gloss on an example he’s studied in some detail and now, in the next paragraph he invokes Lévi-Strauss to contextualize Hayles. First he reminds us that he opened with essay with Lévi-Strauss (p. 418) “It is not accidental, I can now reveal, that at the beginning of this essay I alluded to Le ́vi-Strauss and structural anthropology.” Then he tells us why Lévi-Strauss is important: “Structuralism is a midpoint on the long modern path toward understanding the world as system...” That, of course, is where we are now. We’re some distance along that path; we understand the world as the complex interaction of intersecting systems. That understanding, Liu continues (p. 419), “has forced the progressive side of the humanities to split off from earlier humanities of the human spirit (Geist) and human self to adopt a worldview in which, as Hayles says, “large-scale multicausal events are caused by confluences that include a multitude of forces ... many of which are nonhuman.” There it is: Hayles’ observation has inserted Heuser and Le-Khac into the stream of progressive humanistic scholarship that followed upon the insights of Lévi-Strauss, the structuralists in general and, of course, post-structuralists. That research isn’t a deviation or a diversion, it’s a continuation. From there to the end of the essay Liu briefly glosses the institutional challenges facing the humanities – instructional methods and media, jobs for humanists and digital humanists – which are driven, in part, by digital technology.

* * * * * What then is the point, not of Liu’s essay, but of this particular treatment of it? The point, I suppose, is simply to show how it works as a piece of language, as a text that grabs our attention and then works with and through it. That Liu has adopted a structural technique that is usually associated with fictions, that is interesting. But there is a specific point at issue in the technique he’s adopted, ring-composition. That is this pesky business of authorial intention. Did Liu intend to write in this form, or did it just happen? Intention, of course, is a tricky business. In this case I’m interested in conscious intention. Do authors of ring-form texts consciously set out to create ring-form symmetry or does it just happen as a side-effect of whatever it is that they do consciously intend?

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For the most part I’m inclined to the latter view (while Mary Douglas opts for the former in Thinking in Circles). I don’t know what Liu had in mind when he wrote this essay, or how it developed over time, from one draft to another, from one presentation to another, but, if I had to guess, I’d guess that he didn’t set out to create a ring-form. Though I have no intention of trying to guess at what he did think, it makes to me that his ring-form should be a side-effect of more local and specific deliberations. It seems natural that he would want to embedded a specific well-considered example within more general discussions before and after:

A B A’ It also seems natural that he would want to organize that central discussion around a proposition that follows from the first part of the discussion but which, in the second part, is shown to be inadequate. We do that sort of thing all the time. Thus:

A B C B’ A’ And we have our ring. Who knows, if I think about THAT enough perhaps Gojira will become more comprehensible.

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Shades of the tabula rasa, something’s happening here… An open letter to Alan Liu concerning the notion of a tabula rasa interpretation which he introduced, though not in his own person, in “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” (PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423).

Hi Alan, You know, in a way Stanley Fish anticipated the notion of a tabula rasa interpretation way back in his 1973 essay, “What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It? (reprinted in Is There a Text in This Class?, which is where my page numbers come from). Fish takes on an article by the linguist Michael Halliday, remarking that Halliday has a considerable conceptual apparatus – an attribute of many modern linguistic theories, lots of categories and relationships, all tightly defined. After quoting a passage in which Halliday analysis a single sentence from Through the Looking Glass, Fish remarks (p. 80):

When a text is run through Halliday’s machine, it’s parts are first dissembled, then labeled, and finally recombined in their original form. The procedure is a complicated one, and it requires many operations, but the critic who performs them has finally done nothing at all.

Now, though I am familiar with some of Halliday’s work, I’ve not yet read that particular essay. Still, Fish’s characterization seems fair, and would apply to many similar and even not-so-similar models. Note, however, that he frames Halliday’s essay as one of many lured on by “the promise of an automatic interpretive procedure” (p. 78). That, it seems to me, is the tabula rasa interpretation which you see as the goal of a least some digital critics. To be sure, Halliday did his work manually, but by that time the computer was very much in the air. On the one hand, Chomsky’s linguistics was driven by the notion of an abstract computer, but also computer-based statistical stylistics was fairly well established and Fish also hacks away at some of that work. But, as far as I can tell, and I’ve been thinking about this for a lllllloooonng time, with one odd exception, there is never going to be any such thing as an automatic interpretive procedure. The exception first. If you really want a computer to crank out interpretations, readings, untouched by human hands, then you’re going to have to program and train the computer to simulate such a human – something David Hays and I imagined in our 1976 essay, Computational Linguistics and the Humanist (Computers and the Humanities Vol. 10, 1976: 265-274).24 Just how that’s to be done I don’t know, but I think the general idea would be to hand-code basic (simulated) human functionality and then train and teach your golem critic the rest. How would we do that? Most likely in some approximation to the ways that by which we train students to write interpretations. And that implies that what this “automatic interpretive procedure” is going to crank out are approximations to the various symbolic, deconstructive, psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, etc. interpretations we’ve already got in abundance. And those approximations will be subject to (approximations to) the same limitations and failures, the same mediated finitude, as our human readings exhibit.

24 http://www.scribd.com/doc/80413385/Computational-Linguistics-and-the-Humanist

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What a letdown! All that work and we’re back where we started. Well not quite. We made the golem. We know how it works. Shades of Vico! Verum factum. Let’s set that aside. For I don’t see that happening any time soon. When I hatched that fantasy I figured it would take 20 or so years of realize, but Hays and I didn’t put that guess into the paper. Back in those days – I was a graduate student – I was always pestering Hays for estimates as to when this or that thing would be possible. And Hays would always refuse to provide such estimates, regarding them as foolish. Hays had been with computational linguistics from the beginning, when it wasn’t called that. Rather, it was a specific task, machine translation. You feed the computer a text in one language, say Russian, and it cranks out a translation in another language, say English. In the 50s and 60s the Federal Government put a lot of money into that effort and then pulled the plug on the funding. It wasn’t getting enough bang for those Federal bucks. What had happened with Hays and others, however, is that they’d learned a lot, a lot about language and a lot about computing. Things they couldn’t have learned without making the effort to crank out translations by machine. That effort changed their imagination, their sense of the thinkable. And so they continued on in those new directions, but without generous government funding. The funding is neither here nor there. The failure, the learning, and the change of imagined possibility, that’s important. Getting back to that tabula rasa automatic interpretive procedure, as I said, it’s not gonna’ happen. What IS happening now is that we’ve got an array of computational procedures that we can apply to texts, singly, in handful-sized batches, or by the thousands, and those procedures yield results. It’s up to us to interpret those results in a meaningful way. As you know, it sometimes takes a bit of work to put results in a form that we can interpret. There’s a lot of work on visualization techniques, and a lot of playing around. As for interpreting those results in a meaningful way, what’s your pleasure? We’ve got Moretti interpreting some of his results into Wallerstein’s world-systems theory; Heuser and Le-Khac interpreting into Raymond Williams; I vaguely recall, but cannot cite, a recent paper looking at 100s of versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” in cultural evolutionary terms. How we interpret these results is up to us. No doubt we will soon be creating new frameworks into which we interpret these strange conceptual objects we’re creating. This is a brave new world, no? We set out to find the elusive tabula rasa interpretation, the unmediated paradisiacal vision, and we end up in a place we’d never imagined and can scarcely comprehend. I’d say we’re doing pretty well. With regards, Bill B P.S. While taking a shower I got to thinking. Let’s start with my penultimate paragraph, last sentence: “No doubt we will soon be creating new frameworks into which we interpret these strange conceptual objects we’re creating.” That’s where Moretti ended up in his pamphlet, Network Theory, Plot Analysis.25 After producing scads of nice network diagrams he declares defeat (p. 11): “It is never easy, realizing that one has reached a dead end, pure and simple. But this is what it was. Using networks to gain intuitive knowledge of plot structures had played an important role – but we had now reached the limits of its usefulness.” 25 http://litlab.stanford.edu/?p=337

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Well, OK. What I think is going on is that Moretti and his labmates have been unable to identify any existing body of theory and models they can use to interpret those graphs. Those graphs depict something, but they don’t know what. In an ideal world they’d be able to go down the hall, turn left, and then knock on the third door to the right. The person who answers would ask: “You wouldn’t by any chance have some graphs showing the relationships between characters in Shakespeare plays, would you? I need something like that to answer some questions which have arisen in the course of modeling human interaction on a complex manifold.” And a collaboration would be born. Alas, such a person probably doesn’t exist. Not yet. But one day someone is going to look at those graphs and start thinking. In due course, they’ll come up with a theory in which those graphs, or some very like them, will be meaningful. And that’s why I’ve been pursing the notion of description.26 Those graphs describe something about those texts. That makes them potentially valuable. These days I happen to be interested in ring-form27 texts. I know how to spot them and describe them, sorta. But I don’t know of any framework in which I can explain that formal structure. Since those texts really do have that structure, there must be some explanation. Someone else will have to produce it. Meanwhile, I can at least provide more examples of that thing which must be described. That’s a worthy job. Biology has been built on centuries of patient and painstaking descriptive work by generations of naturalists. Let us do likewise.

No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement.

—Bruno Latour

26 I’ve written a fair number of posts theorizing description. Here’s the link: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/description 27 Here’s a link to the posts I’ve written on ring-forms: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ring-form

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To Capture Infinity in a Bottle: The Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism The Gist: The only way the digital humanities are going to develop a cultural analytics that is sui generis is by thinking about the nature of computation itself in relation to human minds, as embodied in human brains, and as developing though interaction with other minds through various media and in groups of varying size and social structure. Otherwise the digital humanities will have no choice by to borrow its cultural concepts from other discourses, as it is now doing.

* * * * * Let has start from some passages. First up, Alan Liu, from “Why I’m In It” x 2 – Antiphonal Response to Stephan Ramsay on Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism (September 13, 2013)28:

The digital humanities can only take on their full importance when they are seen to serve the larger humanities (and arts, with affiliated social sciences) in helping them maintain their ability to contribute to the making of the full wealth of society, where “wealth” here has its older, classic sense of “well-being” or the good life woven together with the life of good.

Compare that with Willard McCarty, A telescope for the mind? (Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): “What can the digital humanities can do for the humanities as a whole that helps these disciplines improve the well-being of us all?” Back to Liu:

It seems to me that digital humanists can and should evolve a mode of cultural criticism that is uniquely their own and not a mere echo of fading humanist cultural criticism by treating their immediate objects of inquiry (academically-oriented technologies and methods) as always also “mediate objects of inquiry” bearing on the way the human beings they wish their students could become (and they themselves could be on their best days) can really engage meaningfully with larger social agents and forces....The goal is to do research, to teach, and to live as if humanities technology is constantly intertwined with, reacts to, and acts on the way the links are now being forged between individuals (starting with those in the academy where we teach and conduct research) and the social-economic-political-technological constitution of contemporary society. What it comes down to is that the digital humanities need both to work on tools and methods in their own institutional place (the academy) and to develop a capable imagination of the relation of that unique institutional

28 http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/why-im-in-it-x-2-antiphonal-response-to-stephan-ramsay-on-digital-humanities-and-cultural-criticism/

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place (or family of variant institutional spaces) to the other major institutions that play a part in enabling or thwarting the passageway from private human subjectivity to public social sensibility.

It seems that Liu is imagining a cultural criticism centered on institutions and society, one that treats computers and minds as black boxes whose inner workings remain unexamined. In this practice it seems to me that the ideas about culture and society would likely come from already existing bodies of work. Stephen Ramsay gets down to it in a comment to Liu (and others):

I think we have lost the sense (in cultural criticism, and even more within in DH) of this idea that humanistic inquiry should lead to particular ways of life — particular choices concerning not merely how to view the world, but how live in it. This is, of course, the original meaning of *ethica*, and I think that if the humanities (including DH conceived as a form of humanistic inquiry, and not merely another branch of STEM) is to survive, it needs to reconceive its entire reason for being.29

Is it possible to derive an ethos, an ethics and an aesthetics, from computation? That depends on what computation is, no? And we don’t quite know what computation is. And by “we” I don’t mean us humanists, I mean we, the intellectual community. When serious thinkers–Steven Wolfram (A New Kind of Science) most visibly–propose that the cosmos in computational in nature, the nature of computation itself must be considered up for grabs. Let’s return to McCarty, who took the title of his essay, “A telescope for the mind?”, from Margaret Masterman, a mid-20th Century British polymath who had studied with Wittgenstein and was one of the founders of computational linguistics.

“Analogy is an identity of relationships” (Weil 85), not of things. Thus the computer could now be to the mind, Masterman was saying, as the telescope was to 17th-century observers, enlarging “the whole range of what its possessors could see and do [so] that, in the end, it was a factor in changing their whole picture of the world”. She suggests that by thus extending our perceptual scope and reach, computing does not simply bring formerly unknown things into view, it also forces a crisis of understanding from which a new, more adequate cosmology arises. ... She was not alone in thinking that the computer would make a great difference to all fields of study, but she seems to have been one of the very few who argued for qualitative rather than quantitative change–different ideas rather than simply more evidence, obtained faster and more easily in greater abundance, to support ideas we already have in ways we already understand.

Will the further development of the digital humanities lead to that qualitative change–in our ideas about the mind, about culture, about history–or will that development only gives us more kinds of evidence to bolster “ideas we already have”? Now we conclude with Franco Moretti. Consider his most recent pamphlet, “Operationalizing”: or, the Function of Measurement in Modern Literary Theory (December 2013 PDF).30 He’s been examining Hegel on Antigone. The payoff comes at the end of the paragraph but I give you the rest so you can get a flavor of the moderately strange world in which Moretti has been walking:

29 http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/why-im-in-it-x-2-antiphonal-response-to-stephan-ramsay-on-digital-humanities-and-cultural-criticism/comment-page-1/#comment-43182 30 http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet6.pdf

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The protagonist is a utensil; character-space, is an instrument. The protagonist is a utensil because it belongs to the world of readerly common sense, and doesn’t go beyond it. Character-space is an instrument, because it’s the realization of a theory that wants to understand something “that does not fall under the domain of our senses”: instead of individual characters, the relations among characters. That’s why, in the end, its operationalization produced more than the refinement of already-existing knowledge: not the protagonist, improved, but an altogether new set of categories. Measurement as a challenge to literary theory, one could say, echoing a famous essay by Hans Robert Jauss. This is not what I expected from the encounter of computation and criticism; I assumed, like so many others, that the new approach would change the history, rather than the theory of literature; and, ultimately, that may still be the case. But as the logic of research has brought us face to face with conceptual issues, they should openly become the task of the day, countering the pervasive cliche ́s on the simple-minded positivism of digital humanities. Computation has theoretical consequences—possibly, more than any other field of literary study. The time has come, to make them explicit.

I cannot but agree with those last two lines, so I will repeat them, but this time in my own voice, and with emphasis: Computation has theoretical consequences—possibly, more than any other field of literary study. The time has come, to make them explicit. Notice that it is computation that has the theoretical consequences, not the digital computer, not Baysian inference, not topic modeling, not HTML markup, not Perl, not a concordance, not visualization, not this and not that. Computation.

* * * * * It is my belief, and has been for years, that working out those consequences will inevitably lead to “the collision of computational and human reasoning processes,” as Willard McCarty put it to me in recent correspondence. I’ve thought about this a great deal and have much to say, but nothing to say quickly, nor even things I can point to that seem adequate to me. It remains to be worked out. So I’ll conclude with a few quick remarks. My first point, the one made to me years ago by my teacher, David Hays, is that computation is subject to finite resources. In order to have some effect in the world a computation must issue in a result. No real computation can go on forever. The number of computing elements–processors, memory, neurons, whatever–is always limited and time is finite.* If we follow that line, not to the end, but further along, we’re going to see something that looks like an account of why poems, rituals, stories, designs, pictures, songs & dances, and so forth, are necessary to human life. Our brains are, in theory, capable of infinite computation. But in practice, infinity is always out of reach. The only way to bring those infinite computations to a close is to tell a story, paint a picture, or dance a song. That’s where we’ll find our ethics, our aesthetics, and our cultural criticism.

* * * * *

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*A couple hours after initial posting: Let me add, as addendum, some remarks by my friend and colleague, Tim Perper, who was trained as a molecular biologist and eventually ended up studying manga and anime by way of human courtship and sexuality:

The only comment I'd add is that information is a property of physical systems. Here, the word "system" is not a catchall blobby sort of term, but specifically refers to elements or components, themselves physically real objects, that are linked together physically (e.g., by telephone wires, by acoustic waves, and so forth) that can exchange certain kinds of energy. All of this can be reduced to astro-babble ("I exchange mental energies with my cat") unless we understand that information is realized ("instantiated") in the physically real modification of a carrier (e.g. an electromagnetic waveform). So information is a physical property of matter in the same -- exactly the same -- sense that heat is a physical property of an object in a system. One of the great breakthroughs in SW [Shannon-Weaver] information theory was the demonstration that information is mathematically related to entropy and therefore to heat and the other basic components of thermodynamics.

So we’re getting down to some pretty basic stuff. The computational view is about information, and information is material. Hence computation, real computation, is material. It follows that the computational view is materialist through and through.