MLA 2012: Debates in the Digital Humanities

Hacktivism and the Humanities: Programming Protest in the Era of the Digital University
Elizabeth Losh, University of California, San Diego

In June 2009, Cathy Davidson wrote a blog entry for the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) soliciting applications for a Program Coordinator. In her recruitment, she described HASTAC as a “voluntary network” of scholars who reach beyond academia to expand what the digital humanities could and should be. In doing so, Davidson defined its sphere of influence in broad moral and political terms that included “the role of science and technology and the state of our planet” and “issues of equity and ethics.” However, she concluded her post with a different kind of call to action from her initial “help wanted” message, one that spoke directly to hackers wanting to topple the Iranian regime that had just crushed pro-democracy protests and had shut down the microblogging and text messaging services.

Davidson alerted her audience that Western digital rights advocates had “received an SOS from pro-democracy activists in Tehran asking us all to use basic hacking tools to flood the propaganda sites of the ruling regime with junk traffic in order to bring them down and thereby open Twitter channels again.” Accordingly she reposted the following orders for electronic civil disobedience:

NOTE to HACKERS - attack www.farhang.gov.ir - pls try to hack all iran gov wesites [sic]. very difficult for us,? Tweets one activist. The impact of these distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks isn?t clear. But official online outlets like leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir are currently inaccessible. (Jardin)

What is the connection between Davidson’s eloquent defense of a broader notion of the digital humanities and her reposting of a rushed message that is peppered with misspellings, abbreviations, and infelicities of style? In both cases DH functions as a site of political activism, recognizable as being in the tradition of campus protests about civil rights or anti-militarism that defined how political commitment and dissent were staged in the built environment of the university in the past while also being part of a new vanguard of networked cultures in which protests in temporary autonomous zones could be rhizomatic, sporadic, and even ironic in their rhetorics.

By urging readers to launch distributed denial of service attacks aimed at the Iranian state, Davidson links HASTAC with another frame of cultural reference, that of “hacktivism” or the writing of code to promote or subvert particular political ideologies. In addition to protesting human rights violations, hacktivists have used their programming skills as a form of civil disobedience to promote free and open software, privacy, free speech, freedom of movement, governmental transparency, information ethics, political self-determination, environmental protection, and a range of other online and offline causes. However, because hacking tends to be a virtuoso performance by seasoned programmers, the ability to wield tools that expose vulnerabilities in security, privacy, or accurate data representation is often seen as the sole purview of an elite group of highly computer-literate cognoscenti very different from the print-cultured readers of her blog.

In thinking about the relationship between “hacktivism” and the humanities, it is worth noting that some academics are already risking tenure and even arrest because of their acts of electronic civil disobedience. To understand these phenomena that test academic freedom either to bring politics into academia or academia into politics, I argue it is helpful to examine theories of “hacktivism” or the nonviolent use of digital tools in pursuit of political ends. In the context of the digital humanities, I argue that hacktivism theory can broaden and deepen our understanding of the use of digital tools and of the politics of that tool use and to question the uncritical instrumentalism of so many DH projects.

Of course, some might argue that Davidson’s appeal for hackers to bring down Iranian government sites shows a naïve understanding of how human rights discourses function in the era of the Internet. In practical terms, denial of service attacks on state-run online media may only intensify suspicions that outside agitators are interfering with the internal politics of a country with a long history of unwelcome intervention. Furthermore, such attacks on the state’s propaganda infrastructure do little to promote the work of activists who bear witness through channels independent of the authoritarian state or provide evidence with persuasive power rather than just disruption of user experience.

In response to the Iranian situation, some digital humanities projects took a fundamentally different approach from the cyber-attacks promoted by Davidson. HyperCities, an initiative that describes itself as “a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces,” supported the efforts of UCLA Iranian-American graduate student Xarene Eskandar to create a collection of geotagged social media artifacts that documented Iranian election protests with markers on electronic maps, online videos, links to microblog postings, and explanations of the significance of a range of other digital ephemera from Tehran. More recently, the group created Hypercities Egypt, which included a Google map of Cairo that pinpointed a new anti-government tweet every four seconds. HyperCities director Todd Presner maintained that this retasking of a mapping tool designed to teach about urban history in ancient Rome or Weimar Berlin was completely consistent with the project’s mission, because “HyperCities Egypt gives users a sense of living — and reliving — history.”

Such software also shares information about rapidly unfolding events organized by smart mobs in the present with future participants. Although the HyperCities team sees disseminating real-time data as continuing the scholarly work of building digital archives, such tools may also become of interest to those outside academia who hope that visualized trends could also be deployed to try to predict the future. This is precisely the situation that Laila Shereen Sakr, a.k.a. VJ Um Amel, a USC graduate student has found herself in once the State Department took interest in her project, R-Shief, a suite of tools designed to visualize the shifting real-time patterns of popular opinion in the Middle East to provide “real-time analysis of opinion about late-breaking issues in the Arab world.” By using aggregate data from Twitter and the Web, R-Shief attempts to dissect phenomena such as how people in Egypt are reacting to the latest changes to the constitutional process, how Libyans perceive the presence of NATO forces, what Bahrainis think about the presence of Saudi military, and how pro-regime supporters in Syria are using social media. Being able, literally, to picture such complex social and political interactions could encourage more meaningful dialogue about democracy and civil society both in and about Arabic-speaking countries Shereen Sakr argues. She also embraces open-ended methods of inquiry that recognize contemporary means of communication as “technically mediated, messy, real-time, and fast” and notes that it is already challenging to write a “history of the present,” because “distance is critical to be critical.” Yet through tech@state now she has also been asked to engage in futurecasting so that public diplomacy efforts could maximize rhetorical impact and minimize security risk. Shereen Sakr might seem to be an unlikely ally to the nation-state, given her interest in hacking and hacktivism as part of the USC Critical Code Studies group and her public promotion of the Occupy Data movement, but with a paucity of regional experts and trained analysts of social media, her digital humanities projects have become of great interest to government agencies far beyond the N.E.H.

New uses for digital testimony and evidence even puts the digital humanities in dialogue with movements for decriminalization and political abolitionism. For example, Sharon Daniel’s “Public Secrets” and “Blood Sugar” websites about imprisonment and addiction were created with programming resources from the online journal Vectors and thus partially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Yet many NEH competitions specifically forbid endorsing any particular political point of view and would seem to promote a form of technocratic neutrality antithetical to the ethos that I am describing here.

At its most extreme, outright electronic civil disobedience could be described as the most militant form of political resistance in DH . Many scholars date theories of electronic civil disobedience in the academy to the early work of Critical Art Ensemble as an artist-activist collective. Electronic Disturbance Theater put many earlier principles of the CAE into digital practice with a series of “virtual sit-ins.” For example, EDT organized digital protests on the virtual real estate of official websites in Mexico, the U.S., and the European Union. No actual damage was done to the infrastructure of the sites or to their security mechanisms; the intent was merely “to disrupt access to the targeted website by flooding the host server with requests.”
Nonetheless, after EDT member Professor Richardo Dominguez held a well-publicized virtual sit-in on March 4, 2010 to protest tuition hikes that used computer servers owned by his employer, University of California, and targeted websites of the UC Office of the President, he found himself under investigation and at risk of losing his recently earned tenure. While faculty and students marched on the state Capitol building, Dominguez had instructed some four hundred EDT supporters to help occupy the ucop.edu domain. Because of the timeline of accusations, some claim that it was actually the development of the controversial “Transborder Immigrant Tool” or TBT that caused Dominguez to face possible disciplinary consequences for expropriating public resources and criminal prosecution for violating existing computer law. After all, Fox News was running stories explaining “hacktivism” to their viewership soon after reporting that Dominguez’s group was helping illegal immigrants by recycling cheap mobile phones and equipping them with new software to guide them in making the risky trip across the border to water caches left by humanitarian groups.

The use of computing resources in more conventional digital humanities projects may seem less obviously open to debate, but Dominguez’s case should function as both a cautionary tale and as an aspirational story to those operating in the mainstream of this emerging area. In other words, projects involving text encoding, archiving, or G.I.S. generally use university computer resources as well, and controversies about ownership, access, and control may have consequences for DH projects also. Although the battles over who uses a given server and under what circumstances may seem less contested for a database of Jane Austen novels than a database of covert water caches in the desert, academics involved in all kinds of projects must grapple with the politics of combative IT funding situations.

According to a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a new cohort of “digitally incorrect” professors determined to flout convention in defense of hacktivist principles, such misunderstandings may occur more often now that the university must assimilate “the first generation of new-media artists who migrated to academe.” These faculty dissenters use tools of tactical media as imagined most broadly by theorists like Geert Lovink to include not only software, but also other kinds of small-scale media appropriation, such as “pirated radio waves, video art, animations, hoaxes, wi-fi networks, musical jam sessions, Xerox cultures, performances, grassroots robotics, cinema screenings, street graffiti” (Lovink 189).

At the 2011 annual convention of the MLA, noted humanities scholar Alan Liu made a plea for more political engagement within the digital humanities and specifically for taking hacktivism and tactical media activism more seriously: “In the digital humanities, cultural criticism–in both its interpretive and advocacy modes–has been noticeably absent by comparison with the mainstream humanities or, even more strikingly, with “new media studies” (populated as the latter is by net critics, tactical media critics, hacktivists, and so on).” Liu argues that these predictable catalogues of digital humanities products (“tools,” “data,” “metadata,” and “archives”), modes of institutional membership (“associations,” “conferences,” “journals,” and “projects”), and stock issues (“the digital divide,” “privacy,” and “copyright”) add up to little critical thinking about neoliberalism at best and collaboration with for-profit educational outsourcing at worst.

Davidson and Liu are certainly closer to the center of the digital humanities as it is currently defined, and Shereen Sakr and Dominguez are probably located farther away on its peripheries, but they all argue for the formation of new modes of institutional critique, particularly – in Liu’s case – as impersonal and dehumanized distance learning threatens to transform public education for the worse. Yet the history of the digital humanities told by Tara McPherson describes founding fathers who turned to humanities computing not because they were in love with the aquarianism of Ted Nelson, but because were in full retreat from race, gender, and class in the post-free-speech academy. Nonetheless, the history of new media more generally is now filled with stories of gender and race, since even supposedly neutral algorithms and computer chips were shaped by material culture and the labor practices of female programmers and Native American workers, as N. Katherine Hayles and Lisa Nakamura have explained.
In addition to opening up blackboxed systems of nation and sexuality, many hacktivists also tinker with the materiality of technology and the contingent character of current consumer comforts. For example, CAE and EDT hacktivists have created projects on genetically modified food and nanotechnology in cosmetics. Digital humanists may be similarly incorporating criticism from studies of material culture, social practice, or media archeology, but I would argue that hacktivism pushes this consciousness raising further.

Perhaps it is not heretical to say that the digital humanities is more about bit rot and obsolete file formats than it is about “clean” data and perfect visualizations. As Matthew Kirschenbaum has observed in a recent NEH White Paper, DH maintenance and preservation practices are “localized and idiosyncratic,” much – as I would argue – hacker practice is. Furthermore, because digital humanities projects force scholars to care about mundane matters like maintaining servers and replacing routers, this peculiar breed of academic must also come to understand the instability and materiality of the archive not its permanence and abstraction. Even digital files in the “cloud” exist somewhere in time and space, and high-tech satellites or data barges are built and decay in systems of property and territory. As more digital humanities projects, such as the recent Digging into Data challenge, require international collaboration, the geopolitical, legal, logistical, and material risks are even greater.

In the end, both the hacktivist and the more mainstream digital humanist must be sensitive to the vulnerability and imperfection of digital knowledge systems to pursue their avocations on a day-to-day basis. As Galloway and Thacker argue “the exploit” lets us understand procedures and protocols. In considering the need for supporting a truly hacktivist digital humanities, perhaps we can imagine both new forms of activism and new publics for DH, and in thinking about the relationship between forms of symbolic representation that humanists care about and forms of political representation that activists care about, perhaps we all need to break some systems to understand how they should be built.

A Dan with a Plan

On of the highlights of last week was touring the Center for History and New Media with Director Dan Cohen and interviewing him for a scholarly multimodal hypertext about civic participation and new media that I have been working on for the past year in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Vectors journal. (Other participants include Henry Jenkins, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Ian Bogost, Chris Kelty, Christopher Soghoian, Chris Swain, and Wendy Chun.)

Cohen showed me the file folders and work stations where the Papers of the War Department are being digitized. Of course, fire destroyed the office of the War Department and all its files in 1800, along with details about the day-to-day workings of the early federal government that included primary sources about Indian affairs, veteran affairs, pre-1798 naval affairs, and a number of militia and army matters. For the past two centuries both professional and amateur historians have been reconstituting the 55,000 documents in the collection. The Center is also using this archive as a case study for developing an online transcription tool that uses crowd-sourcing to improve letter recognition, which is funded as part of the We Are the People project.

In Praise of Amateurs

In the Virtualpolitik book, I write about how the NASA website took advantage of the enthusiasm of amateur astronomers to connect to a vibrant online community that was interested in sharing personal experiences and data. So it was interesting to meet Iona Munteneanu of the Smithsonian Institution at the Gov 2.0 Expo, since she is considering how to engage amateur naturalists in a similar way. Of course, the challenge is that data from fieldwork done by non-professional botanists, birdwatchers, and others may not be as uniform as the astronomy work, and there may be fewer pre-existing personal connections between formal and informal communities of practice. However, in the age of database science being funded by the NSF and iPhone applications able to recognize biological taxonomic distinctions, there is hope that more could be done in this area.

Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: Part VI

Although MLA Vice President Michael Bérubé had been, in fact, a longtime blogger, at American Airspace among other sites, he confessed -- as the final speaker at the Richard Rorty archive conference -- to an "ambivalence about the technologies that we have been talking about" and even declared tongue-in-cheek declaration that "I will not join Facebook," since "the more people who join," the more inevitable it was that "Facebook will become self-aware." Nonetheless, Bérubé also admitted to his pleasure in the fact that "I can watch John Coltrane on YouTube" and marveled that "the ancient library of Alexandria" might be "available on Google cache." As he explained his method in his talk about "Reading Rorty Rhetorically," Bérubé announced from the start that "I will not read Rorty philosophically." Nonetheless, there were certainly several commentaries on philosophical texts in his hour of remarks.

Bérubé began by descibing how he "e-met" Dave Maier when Maier was a doctoral student in philosophy in Columbia and an enthusiastic commenter on The Valve, an online literary publication that has often been cited as an example of the future of e-scholarship, particularly when it comes to more copious reviews of academic work that bridge academic publishing and the academic blogosphere. He reminded the audience of the number of postings, not always sensitive or nuanced that appeared in response to the short, declarative sentence "Richard Rorty has died" and the fact that 4,000 word posts about Rorty (and about his own work) are not uncommon in the blogosphere.

For example, Bérubé noted the lack of print reviews for What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts. (The book did earn, however, an amusing graphic novelization here.) However, Maier provided an in-depth reading of one section of Bérubé's book in a posting on his blog in which he cautioned Bérubé against "the cutting of philosophical corners" in his application of Rorty. Maier also was the author of "Dave Maier tells you interesting stuff about Rorty," which Bérubé described as part of a larger debate about the deniability of the existence of "true statements that get things right." In the wide-ranging discussion, Bérubé noted that "the entire exchange took place on blogs."

(Bérubé also alluded to his exchanges with Mark Bauerlein over The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies, some of which appeared in the pages of boundary 2. Having sparred with Bauerlein myself a bit in the blogosphere, it seemed a relatively restrained performance on his part.)

In Bérubé's reading of his exchanges with Maier and others about Rorty and the issue of relativism at the center of the debate and the question of how "resistance to realism must be global," the historical context of the Alan Sokal hoax in Social Text was key. Nonetheless, at one point Bérubé made fun of the continuing discussion of Sokal's fake postructural quantum physics article and indicated that he had grown tired of its many sequels, which he joked could be called The Conquest of the Hoax or Return from the Valley of the Hoax.

Bérubé drew the audience's attention instead to "stupid realists tricks that I am not performing" since there was going to be "no teleology" in a cosmology in which "it’s going to be quantum turtles all the way down." In other words, he challenged the notion that physics is foundationalist and insisted that it was "not the template for the rest of human knowledge."

As an example, Bérubé cited the existence of Cosmic Background InfraRed Radiation. (If readers want to know more about the subject, I would recommend that they go to this part of an excellent tutorial written by Virtualpolitik friend Ned Wright.) For Bérubé, it is a classic example of Latour's "science in action," since the connection made between two different disciplinary fields was made possible by a social process to enable interpretation when nature was "not talking to us but just chattering."

In reading Rorty alongside John Searle, Bérubé wants to address the possibility that "anti-foundationalism" might operate in a different realm of truth than "quarks and Neptune." He urged his critics to "stop conflating natural and the social." Rather than spend too much time on Sokal, he returned to his reading of Sam Harris, the anti-religious author of The End of Faith, which was in the defense of Rorty section of What's Liberal that Maier analyzed.

Also important in Bérubé's argument is his own position as the parent of a disabled child. His book Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child chronicles his experiences as the parent of a child with Down's Syndrome a decade before "disability studies" became a recognized academic field. He talked about the ways that such disabilities challenge traditional notions of "social constructionism" and expose the stereotypical assumptions underlying the hackneyed "nature vs. nurture" debate. He also mocked the "Upper Westside criteria for being human" that are further dismantled here.

In this context, it is worth noting that earlier in the day at the Rorty conference, philosopher Margaret Gilbert discussed Rorty's position on human rights, which Rorty had developed most fully in his famed Oxford Amnesty lecture, where he described human rights discourses as driven by "long sad stories" and what he calls "sentimentality." (Gilbert also alluded to Thomas Jefferson in her opening, which caused the eighteenth-century literature specialists in the audience to later remember that this American slave-holding founder of human rights doctrine had read Lawrence Sterne to his wife on her deathbed in his own sentimental scene.) Gilbert's own opinion about human rights philosophy appeared to be that good agreements might be more important than either ideals or pathetic narratives. Bérubé returned to this earlier discussion at least once with a reference to "moral disagreements about the rights of the disabled."

Like a good closing speaker, Bérubé also referred back to other discussions earlier in the day, especially the presentations by the two Heideggerian philosophers at the conference: Iain Thomson and Mark Wrathall. He dryly apologized for being a person "not good at fixing alleged bugs in the dualist mainframe." He also discussed the value of "coherence and consensus" in exchanges in which he might "persuade most of you not all of you" based on "standards of evidence and argumentation." He said that he was "not arguing about something that can’t argue back" or obliterating the "distinction between brute fact and social fact" in the process. Rather than thinking about that which might "push back" in a Heideggerian sense, Bérubé was engaging in discussions more on the order of debates like "are there really neutrinos?"

Bérubé also described his own uncanny encounter with a remnant left by his younger self when reading in the Rorty archive at UC Irvine. He had found a three-page handwritten note to Rorty, which he had written while a student in Rorty's Heidegger seminar at the University of Virginia. "I actually did this!" he marveled. He also asked himself, "What am I going to say about Heidegger to Rorty?" He explained that he eventually turned in a fifty page paper and thus further established his status at the time as "the graduate student from hell." He also recollected his interest at the time in a particular section of Being and Time about Isaac Newton, which was on pages forty-three and forty-four of his text, and opined that the conjunction between science and philosophy that he had explored remained relevant in contemporary discussions. He shared other memories about Rorty as a teacher as well and expressed respect for his "intellectual demeanor" and the fact that "he gave us essays of people that disagreed with him" and was always determined "to keep a civil conversation going." He also described how in the mid-eighties Rorty gave seminars to true believers on Derrida and then Freud that offered both "possible vocabularies" and substantive criticism of both thinkers.

Rather than memorialize Rorty, Bérubé often emphasized the living character of his legacy. At one point he encouraged the crowd to "imagine a Rorty that has the affect of a Žižek." He also suggested that this Rorty might be just as interested in "zoning laws and recycling structures" and other matters quotidian rather than numinous. He even quoted on of the great Rorty ironic lines in this respect: "that’s what a heaven is for."

He also praised Rorty for his "clear, declarative sentences." While Derrida often sounded "more like James Joyce than like John Rawls," Rorty penned straightforward sentences like this: "Derrida learned from Heidegger that phonemes matter." As Bérubé exclaimed, "How could anyone would write a sentence like this?" He joked about the intellectual press for which Rorty often wrote and its frequently inferior authors: "Dissent and Commentary merged to form Dysentery."

Bérubé returned to his discussion of academic blogging, although he conceded that "you say you have a blog, and people treat you like you own a ferret." Overheated blogging, he seemed to argue, was a uniquely academic pursuit, since "of seven people I have banned from my blog, all but one has been an academic." He granted that the use of blogs for scholarly discussions was creating a "really difficult problem for the archive" with "discussions that are ephemeral" like "seminars happening in real time."

He pointed to John Holbo's online essay about "Rorty's Rhetoric of Anticipatory Retrospective" as a commentary on the "third backlash against theories." Holbo defines this "anticipatory retrospective" as follows:

How does it go? Rorty wants to change your mind about politics. How does he do it? Not by giving you reasons not to think a certain way. Rather, by inviting you to consider the ‘hopeful’ possibility of a future when ‘we’ will no longer think this way. That is, he imagines a time when the sorts of people he is disagreeing with will, ex hypothesi, have had their paradigm shifted, so that it will simply ‘no longer occur to them’ to think the thoughts Rorty thinks are not useful to think.

Holbo finds Rorty's rhetoric ultimately "unsatisfactory." As Bérubé summarized it, "he thought it all went wrong with Sassure" and wants to defend the Kierkegaardian position. Bérubé also argued that all this attention to the "difference between religion and secularism" in the blogosphere "speaks as if secularism is a done deal."

According to Bérubé, now Rorty has undergone a "distinct change in cultural status," as he has become "a piñata for the left" for having composed works like "The Unpatriotic Academy." Furthermore, Bérubé said, "religion as conversation stopper" in the era of Stephen Carter’s laments. He also discussed the ironies of seeing all twentieth century liberals together as "people who all inhabit the same pantheon." (Bérubé reflects his own relationship to the American left in this interview.)

Bérubé closed by looking at one more opposition: Rorty vs. Nancy Fraser. In conversations leading up to the conference, he discussed the analysis of Rorty in The Way We Argue Now. In considering Fraser's "Dilemmas of Justice in the 'Postsocialist' Age" and its analysis of "interests and identities" in a"postphilosophical society," he wondered aloud about where we would be going from here.

As Bérubé ended his talk, he described a bizarre scene in which critics of poststructuralism gloated when de Man's articles in support of the Nazis appeared and cried, "Now we’ve got you!" to all poststructuralists, even the ones who weren't of the de Man School, such as Lacanian feminists who were already making different claims on truth and objectivity.

In defending "philosophy as creative enterprise," Bérubé faced questions from the audience about "pragmatism and romanticism," but the end of his talk turned out to be only the beginning of an evening of socializing in which the day's conversation continued.

Update: Bérubé's own wrap-up is here.

Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: Part V

Rhetorician and pragmatist Steven Mailloux began his talk by repeating this dictum: "On the Internet people are demoralized in the shortest possible time at the largest possible scale at the cheapest possible price." This saying would prove to be Mailloux's summary of a talk given at the University of Copenhagen in 1998 by Heideggerian philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, which is now available online as "Kierkegaard on the Internet: Anonymity vrs. Commitment in the Present Age." Based on the availability of Dreyfus's work online, it is clear that Dreyfus was no Luddite even then, but Mailloux described how Rorty's response to the talk, which was available to him thanks to the Rorty born-digital archive, depicted a more optimistic view of online access and participation in public discourse.

Mailloux also described Rorty’s own reluctance to use the label "rhetoric," because Rorty wanted to avoid reintroducing the old "rhetoric vs. logic battle" of the era of Aristotle and Plato. Because Rorty was interested in the "use of language in a context," Mailloux argued that his neopramatism was inherently rhetorical. (At this point, Mailloux also raised the question of how language itself was defined and the fundamental difference between "tool" and "medium of expression.") He then reviewed the media history of the Habermassian model of development of the public sphere, in which the press extended to a broader public that included "the many and the mediocre." He explained how new media also produce this leveling with the new massive distribution of de-situated information that was making information available to everyone, including the de-situated detached spectator. Thus society faced a loss of local personal involvement, a development seen by Habermas as triumph. However, Kierkegaard saw the new media of his era as "just idle talk" or an "agent of nihilistic leveling." And Dreyfus read Kierkegaard with the deep suspicion of technology of a Heideggerian.

Although Malloux admitted to lacking definitive evidence that Rorty came to the same Copenhagen conference in person to deliver his response to Hubert, Mary Rorty volunteered the fact that her husband probably only missed "one conference and two classes" in the course of his entire career. Mailloux had also found a document that seemed to be Rorty's response, which was entitled simply "Comments on Dreyfus."

Bert Dreyfus and I admire many of the same authors, in particular Heidegger and Kierkegaard. But we differ about the use to which they can be put. Most of us Heidegger-freaks read him the way Christians pray, Zen Buddhists meditate, Janeites reread Persuasion, or Shakespearians rehearse the sonnets. We treat Heidegger as an author who helps us toward something like spiritual or imaginative perfection. It does not occur to us that he might be used for public purposes. Writers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard, we believe, were not at their best when commenting on current events or public policy.

Bert reads these philosophers differently. He once, famously, organized a conference on "Applied Heidegger"--the first of its kind. In the paper he has just given us he treats Kierkegaard as capable of offering advice on the problems of our own day, a use to which it had never occurred to me to put him. I am dubious about this, and particularly dubious about The Present Age, which seems to me Kierkegaard at his crankiest, and a big come-down from books like Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The Present Age seems to me mostly just an expression of the same aristocratic disdain which we find in Nietzsche's passage about "the last man", in the works of Straussians like Fukuyama who resonante to that passage, and in Musil's disdain for Kakanian culture.

Rorty divides authors into those of "private autonomy" and those of "human community." Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard are placed in the former camp, while Marx, Dewey, and Habermas, as fellow citizens, are placed in the latter. He contrasts the vocabulary of self-creation with the vocabulary of justice as well.

Rorty proposes a different history of the new media and politics in his response, one that often sounds more like Nicholas Negroponte than a philosopher who inserted ancient Greek characters in his manuscripts.

Turning now from Kierkegaard to the internet, my own take is that the triviality of the chat rooms and the mindless proliferation of websites are a small price to pay for the political opportunities which the net offers. We in the rich old democracies, who are accustomed to intellectual freedom, may not appreciate what the net can do for people in places like Peru and Kazakhstan. I think it is significant that throughout the 1980's there was a fierce debate going on in the USSR between the ministries concerned with technology and the KGB. The former said that the Soviet economy would become non-competitive unless the USSR could raise a generation of hackers. The KGB rejoined that hackers made a police state almost impossibly difficult to administer. They were both right. In my utopia, all the funds currently spent on UNESCO, and on shipping people like me to international conferences, would be spent on fiber optic cables providing internet connections between every educational institution in the world, starting with the universities and proceeding down to the primary schools. One effect of this would be that whenever a portion of the web went dark--whenever it became clear that the teachers in a given city or village were no longer chatting with friends and colleagues abroad--it would be obvious that the thugs had moved in and taken charge. The endless abominations committed under the cover of night and fog by the police and the military in the backwoods of China, Zaire, and Ceylon would be less easily concealed. Even those done in the backwoods of Texas, Yorkshire, and Bavaria might come to light. Whistle-blowing would become much easier. Education would become much more accessible for poor children. A lot of wonderful things would happen. The internet could be for the development of an international political class what the penny press was for the widening of this class in nineteenth century Europe.

In Rorty's response, he then grants truth to several of Dreyfus's propositions only to denigrate their importance.
It is true, for example, that the net is a perfect medium for slander and innuendo. But that is like saying that money is a perfect medium for fraud and theft. So it is, but a money economy is still clearly better than a barter economy. Any medium of exchange of information will be put to slanderous purposes, but we are still better off with cheaper and more fluid media than without them. I do not see that the internet differs greatly from The San Francisco Chronicle or the Stanford University Library in this regard. It is true that the internet synthesizes the worst features of the coffee house and the newspaper, but it also synthesizes the best features. The separation of public opinion from power of which Kierkegaard was suspicious is a danger, but it is a lesser danger than an arrangement like that of the Roman Empire or contemporary China, in which only those with power get access to information.

Rorty closes his response with a paragraph with enthusiastic support for having those with technical expertise "just put everything they could think of on the net."

I am not sure what Bert has in mind when he says that "it should be the job of information technology to look for structures that solicit and support unconditional commitments and implement them." The first thing that comes to mind is making it for us easier to love Big Brother, though I know perfectly well that that is not what Bert intends. But I get nervous at the thought that somewhere a bunch of information technologists are sitting around trying to figure out how to help my prospective grandkids have unconditional commitments. I am not sure I want them to have such commitments, even though I admit Kierkegaard and Nietzsche make them sound attractive. I would prefer it if the information technologists just put everything they could think of on the net--rigorously hierarchical organized data bases, hypertexts, the complete works of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, programs that teach you symbolic logic and Danish and test your progress, and so on. They could just let us surfers take it from there.

Although Mailloux did not read this section, I also appreciated Rorty's comparison of contemporary web surfing to the distractions of life in ancient Athens.

Nor do I see we are encouraged to aesthetic light-mindedness and instability of character by the net to a greater degree than the ancient Athenians were by theatrical performances and by the gossip of the marketplace. I find it hard to believe the once upon a time, when literacy was less common and alternative models of identity less easily available, there was more ethical seriousness around than there is now. People disinclined to formulate a strong and consistent character have always had a lot of opportunities to avoid doing so.

In reading the Dreyfus and Rorty texts together, Mailloux suggested that we should "rhetorically, pragmatically" borrow from each to avoid the risks of being either "unthinkingly complacent" in Dreyfus's passionate "commitment," which could produce fundamentalisms on the right and left, or "complacently unthinking" in the daily practices of everyday information overloading. As Mailloux argued, "both texts are opportunities for thinking through our complacencies." Unlike Rorty, Mailloux claimed that it was important to recognize the "power of technologies that are not neutral."

In the question and answer session, philosopher David W. Smith asked if the Internet didn't show how commitment could be profoundly lacking and gave the example of an e-mail by a teenager that might lead to the suicide of another teen. (A recent New York Times story about a registered nurse entering into suicide pacts with despondent members of dysfunctional Internet communities might be another example of the lack of commitment that Smith described.)

Dreyfus's former student Thomson also took note of the fact that the Twitter stream was capturing detached snippets of conversation and representing them (or misrepresenting them) as a full account of the day's dialogue and its most significant insights. He also emphasized the ridiculousness of attempting to archive the conference itself, whether through audio or video or a kind of panopticon rendered in 3-D, which -- as the person anxious about losing the Camtasia recording for the day's events -- may not have been as amusing as Thomson intended.

Of course, Dreyfus, Rorty, and Mailloux weren't the first to make this analogy between the penny press and the Internet. It's a comparison that has also been made by Bruce Bimber (with caution) and by Henry Jenkins (with enthusiasm). But the fact that the history of philosophy is an important part of the cultural conversation was definitely distinctive to the "Mailloux on Rorty on Dreyfus on Kierkegaard" chain of reflection and reappropriation that Mailloux presented in his paper.

Three of Mailloux's former UC Irvine graduate students followed his presentation with a collaborative talk that was intended to represent "twenty-first-century scholarship" being done with the Rorty archive.

Ali Meghdadi was the first one to present in the graduate students' group. He emphasized the "continual conversation" he experienced as he learned Rorty's handwriting and reviewed the handwritten draft of Rorty's Ph.D. dissertation. Meghdadi also argued that there was plenty of ephemera to be discovered in Rorty's paper archive, which included an old will that left his garden to his mother, a speech to be delivered in Nepal, and old math homework from his K-12 education. At one point he showed an image of the swastikas on Rorty's dissertation and asked how the disquieting effect of those doodles might be read outside of Rorty's archive.

Next up was Tae-kyung Timothy Elijah Sung, who thought about the importance within contemporary Christianity of the social justice theories of Rawls and Rorty. He also discussed Rorty's impact on Christian schools, despite his so-called "militant atheism," although this influence came "not with religious arguments" but with engagement in current debates about the legacies of figures such as Walter Rauschenbush. This paper trail of letters and e-mails included "honest critiques" in which Rorty asked "how anything might be changed without making everything worse" and asserted his own "apolitical insouciance." He noted that Rorty sent an e-mail to Jeffrey Stout, whose research focused on Christianity and democracy. Then this e-mail was read aloud e-mail to Cornel West, who also cried at the moment of reception. Sung pointed out that such "born digital files" represented by that e-mail might someday be available, so that the future-oriented instrumentalism and thought-enabled action dramatized in the exchange might be accessible to future generations.

Finally Brian Garcia told how he found the "most interesting materials" in Rorty's archive were those materials about him as a teacher. These materials included syllabi, organized lectures, and pedagogical histories, which represented more than "the workings of a great philosophical mind." He described reading student evaluations, which criticized Rorty as "a bit too soft-spoken" and "not too much of a performer," although students praised his "availability and willingness to engage their ideas." He showed an image of Rorty's "Final Take Home," in which one student said, "More visual aids. Just kidding." Another granted, "your lack of pretension helps."

When asked, in the question-and-answer session, about their different experiences working with the online archive, Sung said that "I bring information with my search engine" queries and that he preferred browsing in which he was "not using it for my own purposes."

Update: Here is Brian Garcia's take on the day's events.

Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: Part IV

The programme of the Rorty Archive conference also featured academic bête noire Ian Bogost, who has become known both for taking on archivists who he feels ignore a platform studies perspective and for mocking the pedantic culture of philosophers in the academy. So, given the fact that the morning of the Rorty conference had been devoted to archivists and philosophers, Bogost often delivered his appreciation of Rorty in the form of a critique of attitudes about his work and his archive.

Bogost began his talk, "We Think in Public," in 1999 with an account of tech entrepreneur Josh Harris's decision to create "QUIET" an art/performance space for one hundred friends. QUIET was equipped with bus depot televisions that could view activity everywhere in what Bogost called an "Orwellian clubhouse where libertarians could try their hand at Fascism." (Another account of QUIET by participant Steven Kaplan is here.) Harris and Jupiter communications had faith that the future would be online television and that sites like Pseudo.com, which was founded by Harris in 1994, would be huge revenue-generators. After QUIET closed, Harris decided to spend 1.7 million dollars wiring up the Soho loft he shared with then-girlfriend Tanya Corrin to broadcast every detail of their lives, including copulation and defecation, for the We Live in Public project. Bogost explained that before Harris left such experiments for life in a remote apple farm, his enthusiasms were often driven more by fiscal pragmatism than by utopian excess, since "everything is free except the video we own." In this way Harris "anticipated standard practice," since "everyone lives in public" in the pods created by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who reigns over four hundred million participants rather than Harris's hundred or hundred and fifty.



Bogost reminded the audience that Rorty himself was suspicious of "cautionary techno-tragedies" and that it was no accident that he began the book Achieving Our Country with an unflattering comparison of novels like Snow Crash to the earlier socialist novels that effected real change. For Rorty this opposition showed the difference between spectators and agents. Bogost argued that although We Live in Public is nonfiction, the dystopia in Harris’s online studio in which "any idiot can live in public."

Then Bogost criticized the current paradigm of "the public intellectual," as he argued that Rorty presented a much more serious challenge to us and for us "to think in public" and not in the way in which "public intellectual" functions in the present day "more as an armband than as a badge." He mocked what he has elsewhere called "the turtlenecked hairshirt" of contemporary intellectualism that purported to offer the public "sweet ripe berries" that are more superior to their mass-market "preserves." He also drew attention to the small proportions represented by "the public intellectual’s public," which encompassed readers of periodicals like American Prospect, The Nation, Dissent, New Republic, and The Atlantic. After drawing attention to the narcissist self-absorbed writer depicted in a typical Charlie Kaufman film, Bogost asked "Are we just kissing babies?" Bogost did not want to spare his audience from confronting the possibility that academic production merely represents a "futures market hedge" or a "sordid indulgent liberalism of the liberal arts." As Bogost put it bluntly, "Thinking in public is orthogonal to scholarly life," and "the public intellectual is an oxymoron." Although "intellectual rigor" is used as an honorific in the academy, Bogost pointed out that it was really a form of grotesque rigor mortis that most would shun.

Then Bogost turned his attention to the need for what he called a "post-autistic philosophy" that is more than an "exercise in inner pedantry." He charged that the philosophical profession, as it was normalized by the APA, had made "doing philosophy" little more than hunting for "weaknesses in arguments" rather than an offering of "imaginative, illuminating redescriptions." He used Rorty's own words to poke fun of a stereotype that he has compared to the character of "comic book guy" in the animated television show The Simpsons. Such a person is a quintessential "nerd pedant" designed to lampoon "the nitpicking of the Internet in general." Bogost asserted that this nitpicking was certainly put on display in the blog comments about Rorty’s death that followed the "Rorty has died" announcement on the web. He also insisted that it was manifested in the academy's reactions to Rorty in general as a philosopher, in an academic culture in which "'discourse' is brand name for a device to manufacture petty snipes."

Although Bogost is an avowed, anti-correlationalist, reader of actor network theory, and object-oriented ontologist, he argued that Rorty made a number of significant contributions to intellectual history, three of which he enumerated in his talk.

1) Irony: Bogost praised the fact that "Rorty’s ironist is a good conversationalist," one who participates in "listening" and is "skeptical of private enclaves and zones." His attachment to any particular coterie was just as incidental to his profession as the fact that "a plumber is a Cincinnati Bengals fan." Bogost lauded Rorty's ability to move between the "analytic autocracy and the continental commune" with the canny mobility of Thomson's "coyote." Although many might reduce his contributions to assertions that "Rorty tried to change philosophy and failed" or Rorty was "hoisted on the petard on his own pragmatism," Bogost thought that Rorty recognized that "the purpose of philosophy is escape." (At this point, Bogost actually showed a slide in his beautifully illustrated talk of a stock photo of the escape key with legs.) He reiterated his praise of the idea of "the great outdoors" in intellectual life, and pointed out that "Rorty admired birds instead of propositions."

2) Liberalism: Bogost explained how Rorty's pragmatism issued from Dewey, but he also had "no projects to propose to America"and "no vision" that would lead to close-mindedness. Rorty was, of course, a pragmatist taken with "unabashed patriotism" who was interested in "incremental reform," the "reduction of cruelty," and a greater understanding of "solidarity." Yet he recognized that "philosophy is not the handmaid of politics" and was aware that "liberal politics could add blinders." In acknowledging the difference between ontology and ethics, Bogost argued that Rorty also acknowledged that "the public is a big place."

3) The Linguistic Turn: Bogost described how "Rorty’s contingencies are rooted in vocabularies. Bogost admitted that he admired this aspect of Rorty's work, as a "lapsed Derridian" himself. (Like Thomson, Bogost also attended some of Derrida's seminars at UC Irvine.)

In a time in which scholarly pursuits have become more about "chasing trends more than culturing inspiration," Bogost worried that Rorty's digital archive might merely serve as a kind of vapid curiosity like the praxinoscope. In understanding the writing process both of Rorty and for writers in general, Bogost argued that Rorty's digital files "are really not documents at all." For Bogost, all of the faxes, ledgers, and uninscribed door posting that Rorty created were "not just objects but also things" that were "born as stuff multitudinous" to be appreciated as more than just "digital, textual exhaust." He warned that many theorists of digitality could be "just as reductionistic" as previous theorists of language, particularly when they don't interrogate phrases like "in the cloud" or think about the actual platforms involved in computational production. Bogost insisted that Rorty's files are fundamentally "not documents but entanglements" that include "password reminders" and "browser standards." He worried that the model presented for file systems presented digital archives "like libraries" when perhaps -- in the spirit of Rorty's own wish that he had spent more of his life of poetry -- "like bestiaries or like Walmarts."

Bogost closed by arguing that we "need a new irony." As a good ironist, it is worth noting that during his talk, Bogost punctuated his presentation with several lists of things that philosophers might want to interrogate or which could be seen as representative of the possibilities of this "great outdoors" that he was promoting. Bogost has actually created a Latour Litanizer where users can generate their own poetical lists.



Update: Bogost has posted a brief appreciation of the conference and the many lively exchanges of the day here.

More Updates: Bogost's paper has now been posted here.

Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: Part III

Although there was considerable joking at the conference in honor of the Richard Rorty Archive about Rorty's comment that "the only wrong with German idealism is idealism," there was also a serious attempt to think about Rorty's place as a teacher of the German philosophical tradition and his sparring with the American Heideggerian Hubert Dreyfus. Two of Dreyfus's former students attended the event, both of whom appear in the clips below from the film Being in the World; they raised philosophical objections to an unthinking embrace of the efficiencies enabled by an online archive.



The University of New Mexico's Iain Thomson was the first to speak. Thomson has described himself as a kind of "coyote" in the philosophical profession, who borrows from both the continental and the analytical traditions. (Thomson and I were actually in the same Derrida seminar on "testimony" in the nineties.)

Thomson's paper, which has already been posted online, opened with a joke about Rorty's name:

I recently discovered that “Rorty” is a British colloquialism meaning “boisterous and high-spirited.” I found this amusing, because Rorty in person was famously subdued and somber, his understated delivery in striking contrast to the dramatic and often polemical content of his claims. Delivered in his slow, deep drawl, Rorty’s polemics were alternatingly infuriating or delightful, depending on one’s preexisting attitude toward whatever Rorty was currently disassembling and reassembling in his own image. Dennett caricatured Rorty’s chimerical, almost oxymoronic style as “firebrand views delivered in the manner of Eeyore.”

He then speculated in "Rorty, Heidegger, and the Danger and Promise of the Technological Archive" about what it meant now that "Rorty the man has disappeared into the archives that preserve his thoughts." Thomson used Heidegger's concept of "enframing" or Gestell in the context of a "living event commemorating the opening of Rorty’s technological archive" to ask a number of questions: "What is the opening of memory? How can memory be opened in a way that remains responsible to that which it remembers? Can technology, which increasingly remembers everything, truly remember anything?"

He also asked if the Rorty archive was made "open to broader technologization," could it be "genuinely responsive to the texture of the text." As he noted Rorty was "not here to answer" or provide the "new and surprising answers of which he was capable."

At this point, Thomson alluded to other "absences felt present here at UC Irvine" by saying that "Derrida thinks of technological archivization in these terms, but rightly complicates any simple dichotomy between the spontaneous, creative response of which living beings remain capable and the automatism typical of the technological reaction." Thomson explicated a passage from Derrida's Archive Fever and argued that it showed that "archival technique" inevitably overflowed "the singularity of the event," because routinization was needed for intelligibility; thus "other is subsumed by order of the same." Thomson explained that we are left with a fundamental paradox: "life must be archived for it to live on," and "yet it ceases to live" once archived.

Thomson asserted that Derrida's philosophy of the archive owed much to Levinas, but that Heidegger would have been a more important reference point for Rorty's understanding of technology: "Returning to Rorty, I shall suggest a more Heideggerian understanding of this danger and promise, one in which 'the final vocabulary' (as Rorty put it) is being rather than alterity—a Levinasian 'metaphor' for which Rorty himself could find no use."

I think none of us would deny that something vital has been lost with Rorty’s disappearance into the archive (even though we have lost less of Rorty than we would have lost without these archives, for which we should thus be grateful). Yet, Rorty himself, when he was able to answer for himself, seemed not to believe that technological archivization carried any inherent danger along with it.

Rorty rejected all such Heideggerian suspicions concerning the nature of technology, almost as if he were rejecting the melancholic implications of his own living voice.

Let me draw on UC Irvine’s on-line Rorty archive and quote from a 3 February 1992 letter Rorty wrote to Alan Rosenberg (a philosopher working on the fraught topic of Heidegger and the Holocaust). In this letter Rorty declares (with typical candor) that: "I can’t really take seriously the notion of “technology” which you and Heidegger share. I can’t help seeing the United States as as much or as little a product of Baconianism, and as much or as little a matter of erecting Gestelle as Auschwitz, and so I have trouble seeing Bacon and the Gestell as more than a neutral background against which various things, good and bad, occur. The whole idea of 'the essence of the West,' as opposed to various good things and bad things about the West, is one I have trouble with."

Thomson described how "Rorty adopts the traditional liberal view of technology as a neutral set of tools that can be used either for good or for ill," which Thomson was reluctant to reduce to the "guns that kill people, people kill people" view of the world. But Thomson also wanted to rebut Rorty's attitude about the "modern control of objects" and the "late modern control of resources." He began so by reminding the audience that Rorty himself listed "Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey" as the "most important philosophers" of his century, although Rorty also reduced Heidegger's ambitious attempt to present an understanding of the history of being as "good Whig history."

Then Thomson reviewed five of the components of this history of being presented by Heidegger: ontological historicity, ontological holism, ontotheology, ontological epochality, and ontological excess. (He also recapitulates some of this history here in an interview that might be more accessible to nonspecialists.) It is the third Heideggerian thesis about "ontotheology" that is central to Thomson's argument. As he put it, "Insofar as we implicitly understand what-is through these ontotheological lenses, not only do we dissolve being into becoming, but we tend to relate to and so transform all entities into mere 'resources' (Bestand), intrinsically-meaningless stuff just waiting to be optimized, ordered, and enhanced with maximal efficiency."

In this world of online efficiency, "no event is too banal" when "reality is transformed into information."" He derided how such information circulated endless on the web when computer users "blog about it or describe it on Facebook or Twitter." We also embrace a form of living without the Heideggerian awareness of our own mortality, because "we too hope to join it by downloading our neural nets and living on endlessly as our own on-line avatars." (The "informatization of reality" that Thomson describes could also be considered in conjunction with the many forms of misapprehension -- and misreading -- of Katherine Hayles' so-called "posthuman" state, which also has become of interest in anthropological circles of late. See the recent work of Jenny Cool for examples.)

For Thomson, "a truly postmodern understanding requires us to recognize precisely what Rorty resists; namely, that when approached with a poetic openness and respect, things push back against us, making subtle but undeniable claims on us." He insisted that human beings "need to respond creatively to these claims" and see themselves as world disclosers, experience poetic openness, appreciate the texture of the text, and "use technology against technologization." He granted that a number of technologies actually enabled this disclosure. As examples, he listed the camera, the microscope, eyeglasses, the synthesizer, and the word processor of which Rorty was so fond.

In grappling with the "there is nothing but text" argument, Thomson went back to a comparison of Rorty and Derrida.

What Derrida took from his reading of Saussure and Heidegger, Rorty got from reading Quine and Sellars, and Rorty similarly rejected the idea that “philosophy has a prelinguistic subject matter. Here, however, I think both Rorty and Derrida fail to take phenomenology seriously enough.

He challenged Derridians or Rortians to "try asserting that a meaningful relation to the extralinguistic is a myth to a carpenter, a cook, an athlete, a teacher, or a scientist." He also expressed his disapproval of the ending of the Rorty/Putnam debate in which Rorty described science as "a popularity contest."



Although Mark Wrathall agreed with Thomson on a number of points, he presented a different reading of my Facebook friend and philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg. While Thomson's paper referred readers to an "expansion of this point (which I owe to Andrew Feenberg)" to be found in “From the Question Concerning Technology to the Quest for a Democratic Technology: Heidegger, Marcuse, Feenberg,” Inquiry, 43:2 (2000)," Wrathall posed a more direct rebuttal of Feenberg as a way to understand Rorty's legacy. (You can see my write-up of a recent Feenberg talk here.)

Wrathall distributed a handout to review some of the statements that Rorty had made about Heidegger. They included Rorty's characterization that Heidegger's work is "a toolbox containing some splendid things lying next to a lot of outdated junk." (Of course, as Twitter accounts of Wrathall's talk indicated, "if Rorty thinks of Heidegger's philosophy as a toolbox, Heidegger thinks of it as a German luxury sedan.) Rorty also argued that Heidegger's writings served as "the receptacle in which Heidegger deposited the tools that he invented at various times to accomplish one or another project."

According to his own account, Rorty wanted to "keep the plot outline of Heidegger’s history of metaphysics while rewriting its downbeat ending" and "keep selected items of Heidegger’s imagery and jargon while shrugging off his world-historical pretensions." Yet Wrathall argued that there was no legitimate "account of being" that treats a Google search and a religious icon equally.

If Thomson focused on Heidegger's "ontotheology" in his paper, Wrathall made Heidegger's "universal grounds thesis" the central locus of his talk. He defined this thesis as follows: "within each historical age, there is a particular understanding of being in terms of which entities show up as constitutively related to each other in particular ways. Being is universal, meaning it applies to every entity as such. It is total, meaning it also governs the whole coherence of entities as they relate to each other. And it is a ground in the sense that it is on the basis of the specific understanding of being that any particular entity play a role in the world."

Wrathall then reconstructed the argument of "Heidegger’s Paradoxical Ontology of Technology," which Feenberg wrote with Dana Belu.

1. Either all humans are enframed, or at least one human is not.
2. If humans are enframed, then Heidegger himself would be enframed too, and wouldn’t be in a position to formulate a theory of enframing.
3. Since Heidegger did formulate a theory of enframing, it is either the case that at least one human is not enframed (see 4), or the theory is false.
4. If at least one human is not enframed, then there is some entity which does not show up in terms of the unified understanding of being of the age. Therefore, UGT is false.

If Rorty took Heidegger to task for "academic parochialism" -- for paying undue attention to the development of philosophy, often to the exclusion of the ordinary history, then Wrathall wanted to "sketch out how Heidegger would respond to this critique by showing how Heidegger's focus on philosophy and philosophers was always intimately connected with, albeit not identical to, an account of ordinary history," since "for Heidegger there is no overarching metaphorical account" and "metaphysics is the truth about ethics as such." Often this involves "pragmatically dealing with things," since "metaphysics can only be shown about things." In Wrathall's view "the questioning of reflection never becomes groundless" and the universal grounds thesis serves as a "necessary foundation" that is "inviting us to do ordinary philosophy."

Wrathall also acknowledged that Rorty was doing us a service and that "Heideggerians have failed to appreciate the force of Rorty’s challenge" or see it as a "task for thinking." He also insisted that is was important to recognize that "a lot of exegetical work needs to be done" In contrast, he criticized the "empty informal thinking" of Feenberg and Belu who misunderstood Heidegger’s operatic ideology of technology" and failed to see that "universality can be understood in a variety of ways in a variety of dimensions." Not only should universality not be limited in scope to the natural world, but such universality might include the apprehension that more than one world could obtain at the same chronological moment. Unlike the totality imagined in the Feenberg/Belu reading, Wrathall believed that Heidegger made room for other "extopian outsiders" and recognized "different ontological structures for different types of entities" and a more subtle understanding of the distinction between appearance and reality, because "everything shows up as orderable whether it is or not," and "things aren’t actually resources yet." Thus the philosophical understanding of resources could include appearance, reality, actuality, and potentiality.

During the question-and-answer session, Thomson and Wrathall discussed how their experiences working in Heidegger's archive was very different from accessing materials from the Rorty born-digital archive online. They noted that Heidegger had placed no indexes in his books for a reason. Wrathall described himself as "confused" by Rorty's archive and what it hoped to achieve on the level of philosophical understanding. Thomson also mocked some of the meaningless data-mining currently being done in philosophy and gave the example of searching for the term "woman" in Nietzsche's collected works as a way to develop a thesis on his philosophy of gender.

Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: Part II

Christine Borgman explained how she was initially hesitant to speak at the Rorty Archive conference, which convened for a daylong celebratory event yesterday. Borgman joked that perhaps UCI actually wanted her UCLA colleague humanist Johanna Drucker. Nonetheless, she was eventually persuaded that her talk about "The Digital Archive: The Data Deluge Arrives in the Humanities" would be very relevant to an audience interested in the larger significance of the born digital and the lessons for the humanities that could be learned from scholars in other disciplines already grappling with very large collections of electronic data.

Her slide presentation opened with an actual image of a deluge raining down like a flood upon an orderly assembly of philosophers and literary theorists and classicists. She also described her amusement with the fact that the user agreement for those requesting access to the Rorty online collection still contained anachronistic stipulations like "The reading room is a no-pen zone. Only pencils and laptop computers may be used to take notes." and "Handle and read materials only at the reading room tables. Limit handling of items to the minimum necessary for your research and exercise all possible care to prevent damage to materials."

Now that the Library of Congress is undertaking to archive all of Twitter, an archive growing by 50 million tweets a day, Borgman worried that simple Boolean searches will soon not be good enough for managing data. She suggested that possible prototypes might be developed by those like Lev Manovich, whose UCSD team was developing software to manage twenty million art images. She also expressed hope that the sciences could provide some models, since they have had more experience grappling with unprecedented data availability covering vast sets of information about water, the environment, and bird life. She noted that this "data deluge" could prove "useful for learning as well," since students must serve as active collaborators working with more material than a single scholar can possibly process. As one example, she pointed to work being done in astronomy by students and interested amateurs scanning the night sky. She told the story of how a "strange blue object in the sky" observed in the Netherlands became a major scientific discovery.

Borgman claimed this "data deluge" could also shape a number of public policy issues, as individuals figure out how to use extremely large data sets for art and civil disobedience. She observed that mainstream media outlets are beginning to take notice and pointed to a recent Economist report on "Data, data everywhere" as an example. She explained how Johns Hopkins was taking on large scientific data archives with large synoptic data sets that showed dramatic growth just between the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System.

Next, she introduced the notion of a "knowledge mash-up," which she conceded might seem like an alien approach to the archivists in the audience, because it represented "adding context and taking things out of context" and even putting in "your own politics and interpretation." With the proliferation of off-the-shelf tools from places like IBM, the mantra of an early Apple ad "Rip. Mix. Burn." has become "Unlock data. Remix content. Unleash productivity."



One might have questioned how comparable a Google map of Denver foreclosures and a photoshopped image of Obama in sheeps clothing were in Borgman's section on "media mashups," but the fact that these tools were being used by the business community, the scientific community, and groups like the Open Mashup Alliance was difficult to deny.

Then Borgman shifted to the question of "common platforms" that make such mashups possible. She also gave some credit for how her concept of a "scholarly information infrastructure" -- for either "e-science" or "eResearch" -- had been informed by Amy Friedlander. With some bemusement, she also cited Our Cultural Commonwealth as an example of the "me too" sentiments coming from the humanities, although she expressed her wish that humanists would continue asking questions and building a research agenda that seriously engages with 1. "digital scholarship," 2. "scale," 3. "language and communication," 4. "space and time" (with the timelines, maps, and layers of Perseus and Rome Reborn cited as examples), and 5. "social networking."

By introducing the question "what are data?" Borgman was able to further develop her theme of disciplinary difference. She enumerated four specific types 1) observational, 2) computational (like modeling or simulation), 3) experimental (like lab experiments or field work) and 4) records. She referred the audience to a 2005 NSF report on Long-Lived Data for other policy work on research and education in this area.

She also reminded participants about her own background in the social studies of science to caution against conflating data with facts. Indeed, she said that too many researchers had a "tendency to reify facts" and rely on "alleged evidence" without thinking about "context and framing." At this point she inserted another citation to "Buckland, 2006" on "Metadata as infrastructure: What, where, when and who."

She wondered aloud about the future of the humanities as an "inward looking" field that was "archive-centric" rather than "data-centric." She argued that the humanities had a poor record on "rights to use and reuse" and on intellectual property more generally, which she characterized as "rights in the modern university."

She closed with asserting that "the data deluge is real," even if the Rorty archive only represents the "tiny trickle" that humanists are becoming aware of. She described how Peter Young at the Library of Congress served as an example of an archivist who would have to meet those twenty-first-century challenges. She insisted that the "value of data lays in scale, aggregation, analytical tools, and distributed access" and that the delayed access model in the humanities, symbolized by the five-day approval period for the Rorty digital archive, raised troubling issues.

In the question and answer session, Borgman was asked to review a slide that contrasted information practices in the humanities with those in the sciences. In the humanities, Borgman saw "data usage" driven by "manual mining" in which the scholar must "inspect the individual archive" for "deep interpretation." "Tools" were largely "collection-level finding aids" and "content specific methods." The model for "intellectual property" was aimed at "registered scholars" who were "licensed for local use" and "on-site access."

In contrast, data usage in "data-centric science" privileged "instant access," "robotic mining," "mashups" with other data sets, and "multi-variable analysis." Tools were designed for "open standards," "common platforms," and "mining and visualizations." Intellectual property was determined largely by an "open access license" model, a "share and share alike" ethos, and an environment in which "derivative works" are "encouraged."

Borgman also warned against declaring that the data deluge foretold the "end of theory." With an example about the difference between "weather data" and "climate data," she emphasized the value of making long term comparisons and told of how Harvard was digitizing one hundred years of glass plates created for astronomy records. She also preached against a "one-size-fits-all policy," particularly when there are bad actors, who might misuse information, such as "releasing locations of endangered species."

Update: Borgman's slides are here.

Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: Part I

In planning the conference to celebrate the launch of philosopher Richard Rorty's archive, which includes twenty-four plus linear feet of conventional paper documents and over a thousand "born-digital" computer files that are being made available to scholars on the Internet, we decided to structure the day very differently from a more conventional academic homage that might have treated Rorty's life's work as a stable and static monument to his intellect, one to be defended by unquestioning acolytes unwilling to engage in debates or discussions that might be ongoing or explore the possibilities of "insouciance" -- a word that comes up dozens of times in Rorty's electronic correspondence and remarks.

Instead, as my welcome to participants emphasized, the conference was about work to be done rather than work already done. It was also a day-long interdisciplinary conversation between philosophers, cultural critics, rhetoricians, and archivists about technologies, platforms, media, publics, and scholarship that spoke to Rorty's legacy in a time that we all recognized as transitional.

What was particularly remarkable about the planning of this event was that no one was more supportive of a potentially irreverent approach than Mary Varney Rorty, Rorty's widow and literary executor. When Bruce Sterling suggested in a posting in his Wired blog that the conference might treat Rorty as a mere "digital theory object" or his memory in the era of computational media as a "pig" in "the era of sausage machine," she expressed good humor and said that Rorty would have appreciated being cited in such a publication.

Indeed, Mary Rorty's comments on "Memory, Ethics, and Literary Custodianship in the Era of Computational Media" were the first to be posted on the Internet, and the other papers from the conference will soon be available online. She noted that Rorty "never had a thought that he didn’t write down and publish" and believed that "if you haven’t expressed those first thoughts, that you can build upon or retreat from, your intellectual trajectory remains a private amusement rather than a public good." (She also observed that academics are "socialized to believe that it has to be perfect, just right, deathless and eternal before we can commit it to print," a finding that also holds true in the case of the "conservatism of young scholars," which is described in a recent Mellon Report on publishing in higher education.)

At one point Rorty even wryly recommended "intellectual property law" as an ideal career for the next generation of academics, given the ramifications of "the Internet, Google Scholar, and Google Books." She also said that as an instructor herself, she found it more and more difficult to persuade her students of the "continuing importance of canons of responsible research." She also gently mocked the pessimism of Peter Sloterdijk, who in his Elmauer Rede argued that "thanks to the influence of television and video games, succeeding generations would transcend (or degenerate away from) print, from literacy – would lose the sense of themselves as participants in what Richard Rorty once described as the continuing conversation of mankind." For her, electronic access would nourish print publication and her husband's legacy not supplant it.

Next, Head of Special Collections at the UC Irvine Libraries Michelle Light began to explain some of the features of the Rorty archive's design. She described how librarians realized that the 50,000 pages from word processing documents captured from Rorty's dozens of floppy disks did not duplicate his paper records and were thus extremely valuable for the collection as a whole. She also told audience members how they soon realize that such a "born-digital archive," which was "created and only maintained in digital form," might be valuable for launching the library’s digital scholarship service. Light argued that it was critical for Rorty scholars to understand the collection as a "hybrid archive" in which both parts are integral.

Light also detailed how this collection might pose many challenges to archivists, not only in the present but of the future: "Will we have the right hardware and software? Will the bits still be there for us to read?" She also asked if UCI archivists were right to preserve "content only" and not the "context of author’s computing environment" and asked "How can we be sure that the files have not been tampered with?"

She also discussed a number of issues around "respect for privacy." After all, not only do scholars like Rorty write confidential letters of recommendation, but those letters can be considered to be student records that are further protected by FERPA. Moreover, authors might be saving many of these files unintentionally, since even a "deleted" file is not truly removed from a hard drive. She mentioned how Stanford University had been developing "digital forensics" that would recover lost traces in the digital record. In contrast, she noted that Harvard University was willing to admit that "we don’t have any methodology," since "we just store" materials in climate-controlled rooms and hope for "universal Harvard guidelines" to be written.

Light explained that "we didn’t wait for clear best practices," because archivists had a legitimate concern that "bit rot" would cause loss of data, particularly as the physical material comprising the disk decayed. Furthermore, they wanted to take advantage of the fact that readers of 3.5 inch disks were still readily available on campus, unlike zip drives or the eight-inch drives that once graced the computer of my own youth.

Then Light showed an "Emulation vs. Migration" diagram and told how UCI had chosen to migrate "the files from one obsolete platform to another" and thus lose the "original functionality of programs that Rorty used." Nonetheless, they "opted to preserve content but lost context." To demonstrate a radically different approach, she described the most attention-getting current example of an emulation archive, the Salman Rushdie Archive at Emory University. Information technologists actually created a Mac emulator, which is available in the rare books reading room, where one can open the writer's calendar, read his e-mail, and relive his experience of writing a novel. Emory archivists have described this approach as preserving the "ecosystem" or "biostructure" of Rushdie's digital files.

Light suggested that such whiz-bang digital sleight-of-hand might actually cover over certain issues about "authenticity and integrity" that might be revealed just by looking at the observable difference in the hexadecimal code of documents that are migrated from their original word-processing document format to archival PDFs. "When we transformed the file, we tampered with the digital content." Furthermore, as Light noted, with paper manuscripts, it is much easier to "notice that parts are missing or have been defaced." As she asked, "What is the record we are preserving anyway?"

Although she expected that many would be irritated by the fact that the digital archives are online but not completely "open," she justified the library's decision to put documents behind a password-protected wall on the grounds of concern for copyright and privacy, since archivists didn’t want to open up the Rorty files to Google indexing.

(Ironically, as the archivists were addressing the Rorty audience, participants at the Computer Forensics and Cultural Heritage were meeting on the opposite coast at the University of Maryland. Simultaneously there was a Symposium on the Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College taking place in yet another parallel Twitterverse to the Rorty conference.)

Light was followed by Dawn Schmitz, who emphasized the fact that these were "born-digital not digitized" records. ("Digitized" content would have been created on paper and duplicated electronically after the original had been scanned.)

To understand the theoretical significance of this particular kind of "cultural form," Schmitz referrred audience members to Mark Poster's The Mode of Information. (Poster had been scheduled to be a participant in the conference, but he had been unable to attend because of illness.) She read from a section in Poster's book that theorized that there was a "mirror effect of the human" in which "the human recognizes itself in the uncanny of machine," which "doubles the subject of writing." As an example, she pointed out how the file back-up program on Rorty's computer "automatically generated drafts," unlike the intentionally created iterations that were formed in a conventional archive. She described her own difficulty working with these pseud0' "drafts." She also argued that this digital proliferation makes the fact that these files aren't printed out more advantageous practically, since printing out digital files could create many problems for a library with limited space.

Then Schmitz showed some examples of data corruption, such as the image above, as Microsoft Word imperfectly read the file created in an earlier word processing program of Rorty's that may have treated the ASCII characters he typed somewhat differently from the word processing programs of today. She also argued that one of the virtues of a digital archive was that it provided more affordances in searchability, since one could easily look through the whole correspondence with a search term like "Clinton" to find his discussions of the former president. (See below.) However, in closing, she reminded the audience that creating metadata continued to be the most time consuming part of the archival process and that keyword searchability was never enough.


Next, Erin Obodiac took theoretical reading of the Rorty Archive a few steps further with a talk on "digital immunity," which began with the example of two Rorty typing drills in the digital archive that are composed of the same 1867 sentence: "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” One, however, terminates with a period, while one does not. Her presentation, which she summarized as being about "questions concerning technical reproduction, copyright, publication, authorship, political action, and the significance of the banal and random" also included an anecdote about digital doubling of another kind. Members of the audience chuckled at the fact that Rorty's august new digital archive also included a letter in which Rorty complained that "I have two advantage numbers: K166506, as 'Mr. Richard M. Rorty' and FVJ8956 as 'Dr. Richard Rorty'." She then drew her discussion back in the realm of more serious theoretical reflections by discussing the archival character of Derrida's reading of Nietzsche's fragment about "I have forgotten my umbrella" as being like an archival fragment in a library that exists without its original context.

Perhaps the most clever part of her paper was the part in which she pointed to a 1995 Rorty letter about some tax matters that ended with the phrase "Burn this!" As Obodiac noted, "In the old days 'burn this' might mean, 'incinerate this piece of paper,' i.e., erase this inscription; now, 'burn this' might mean 'copy this file on a disc,' i.e., mechanically reproduce this inscription." For Obodiac, the "born digital" is the "born iterable."

As a champion for digitizing and making open the entire Critical Theory Archive at UC Irvine, there was also a serious critique in her paper about current copyright law and systems of valuation that place sixteen hundred dollar pricetags on images of postcards from one person represented in the archive (Jacques Derrida) to another (Paul de Man) and prohibit replication of the image for educational and critical use. Furthermore, Obodiac protested that the library participated in regimes of privatization in everything from its basic electronic archival design to its library user agreement. Obodiac put her central objections as follows:

Backtracking a second, we will recall the copyright statement on UCIspace, the website that hosts the Rorty Born-Digital Papers: "This material is provided for private study, scholarship, or research. Transmission or reproduction of any material protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. The author(s) of the material or their heirs retain copyright to this material." The point to emphasize here is that the material is for private study, private scholarship, and private research. In theory, there could be an infinite number of individuals engaged in private study, scholarship, and research, and yet no public study, public scholarship, or public research at all.

Much of her paper, which could not be read in its entirety, was devoted to a reading of Roberto Esposito, the author of Bios and Communitas. Of course, many Internet researchers have argued that "digital community" is impossible and that researchers shouldn't even use the term. (Now "networked public" is becoming a frequently substituted phrase.") Obodiac asserted that "digital immunity" received far less attention than "digital community" and that this form of "immunity" denied the "munus," which was both gift and obligation in Esposito's terms, that was at the heart of any archive given by an author or his heirs to an institution.

Tom Hyry, who has recently become the new Head of Special Collections at UCLA spoke last as an "outsider." As a respondent to the panel, he praised the conference's attention to the "relationship between researchers and archivists" and to the problem of the born digital on which he said "many archivists have punted." He described what he called "the disk in a box problem." As he joked, since he used to be at Yale, it could be called "the Harvard problem" as well. Like Light, he also criticized the Emory approach, in which researchers were placed in the "absurd situation of coming to physical reading rooms," which he described as a "conservative but safe interpretation of copyright law" that profoundly missed the point of research efficiency. He also appreciated UCI's straightforward admissions of anxiety about "authenticity and integrity" and the loss of "context," since archivists "live" by that central "tenet of archival theory."

Although patrons might appreciate the ability to search materials easily, Hyry cautioned about potential hidden costs. First, he notes the "concept of appraisal" is changed when material in an archive isn't "thrown out" if it is "considered banal." He also said that "volume" was transforming archival work and that "the Rorty papers" were "a pretty modest collection," because these were word processing "files meant to be printed out on paper." Now archivists must manage "whole different types of expression" and "massive numbers of formats."

Ian Bogost tried to introduce a platform studies perspective more explicitly into the discussion by asking if the archivists might be falling into a predictable patter of digital "idealism" that was perpetuated by "treating everything as documents" or "records" rather than executable code created in response to particular technical constraints. They did seem to understand his question about bit-level preservation, however. As Hyry noted, realms of corporate, finance, and law enforcement already were working with digital forensics, but in archival work such forensics could pose a real ethical difficulty to the profession. He gestured to the audience and reminded them that "your hard drives all have stuff that you think that you deleted."

Fellow philosopher and Rorty family friend Margaret Gilbert raised the question of Rorty's e-mail, which archivists explained that they did not keep in Rorty's case. However, Light explained that predicaments about electronic correspondence would not be avoidable with other digital collections. As Light put it, "e-mail is a beast that we have to wrap our heads around." Donor Mark Poster apparently exported e-mail folders that he thought would be of interest to others in the future. And Stanley Fish's hard drive with a skuzzy port may have other kinds of files as well.

In closing, archivist Jackie Dooley posed a question about cost to which the UCI librarians answered that it took "multiple people multiple months" to work with Rorty's born digital collection. They estimated that it took "20 times as long to process electronic papers." Hyry ended this line of discussion by saying that such cataloging would need to be automated in some way and that they would have to think about using future "technical means" to keep workloads manageable.

Update: Obodiac's paper has been posted here.