BLOG1

[CITATION: 12-26-2011, The Old Order Changeth
By STANLEY FISH
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/the-old-order-changeth/]

Books from the King's Library

The Fish blogs on digital humanities present an awkward challenge. At five pages each, they do have some substance, and Prof. Fish has name recognition in an area where the expectation is sober earnestness. There are enough Milton references to command respect; yet, it is still a newspaper blog and thus has all the weight of yesterday's rumors supplanted by today's gossip. In addition, the prevailing attitude among the silverbacks in the university who want nothing to do with digital humanities is a kind of tolerance; they ignore it consistently.

When one of the seniors, suddenly, in a fit of pique, charges a group of junior faculty minding their own business, trying to formulate their thoughts for the MLA, the fur flies. It is considered really bad form, simially speaking. The rest of the herd is busy grooming and stretching in the sun and wonders what tenets of gorillaism have been violated by the junior members of the clan.

However, the Times does still command some lingering respect from the time they actually still employed editors system-wide, and Prof. Fish still commands respect from the time very learned people bothered to get very upset with him, and some Universities would open their purses to him, and the MLA was his back yard.

The scuttlebutt furtively whispered among practitioners of digital humanities is that Prof. Fish does not really get what it is about. He has retrenched into the paradigm of the "traditional scholar" (some irony there). He now likes to lob mortar rounds fairly randomly from within the secure ramparts of the NYTimes blogs that have inherited no real legitimacy from the op/ed page. The literary form of the blog is, of course, a manifestation of DIGITAL HUMANITIES; electronic journalism, belletristic feuilleton, blogs, video clips, archive searching are all under the big tent of digital humanities. He feels moved to attack a form of innovation, only a logistic innovation really, a rather neutral play in a market of contentious ideologies. His motivation is nostalgia, for digital humanities has no kinship to the post-modern enthusiasms of yesterday.

  Shid ald akwentans bee firgot,
  an nivir brocht ti mynd?
  Shid ald akwentans bee firgot,
  an ald lang syn? (Scottish pronunciation)

They should be shelved in the stacks and footnoted where appropriate.

David Wescott blogs briefly that Fish's ire at digital humanities was caused by a glance at the latest MLA program where he found 40 sessions on digital humanities and none on post-colonialism.

http://davidwescott.net/post/16434683462/stanley-fish-blogging-the-digital-humanities

"Upward of 40 sessions are devoted to what is called the “digital humanities,” an umbrella term for new and fast-moving developments across a range of topics: the organization and administration of libraries, the rethinking of peer review, the study of social networks, the expansion of digital archives, the refining of search engines, the production of scholarly editions, the restructuring of undergraduate instruction, the transformation of scholarly publishing, the re-conception of the doctoral dissertation, the teaching of foreign languages, the proliferation of online journals, the redefinition of what it means to be a text, the changing face of tenure — in short, everything." [Fish, Opinionator, 26-12-2011]

Wescott quotes Fish's list of topics and goes on to say some very mean dismissive things about Prof. Fish and his track-record in innovation / revolution in university literary studies.

Wescott also quotes Fish's chief indictments from the second blog:

The vision is theological because it promises to liberate us from the confines of the linear, temporal medium in the context of which knowledge is discrete, partial and situated — knowledge at this time and this place experienced by this limited being — and deliver us into a spatial universe where knowledge is everywhere available in a full and immediate presence to which everyone has access as a node or relay in the meaning-producing system. [Fish, Opinionator, 9-1-2012]

If Fish wants to stay ideologically faithful to knowledge in his discrete situation, then he cannot Google, i.e. he is not permitted by his faith to Goggle, too shallow, nor can he drag out Renaissance English theology, for that way must also be barred, too referentially ambiguous; the discrete situation is a dead-end both directions. That is why we have to learn. We have to recognize intentionality, not just in others, but our own. That is why we have to do research on indexing and investigate knowledge representation beyond what Milton knew. Node is not a funny word, individuals are the ones who derive meaning from linked nodes. Producing meaning algorithmically is a small specialized field. Go for it, somebody has to try it.

Or is this what is meant by sophism? Whip lashing us into the 17th century and beating us over the head with Milton's theology to discredit digital work which thus becomes identified with things long rejected, e.g theology from the time of Elizabeth to the Glorious Revolution, or however one might characterize that difficult period of transition. But it is silly to reject the thought of the past as though it were misleading the youth of today. Nor is it acceptable to identify digital humanist with Roundheads. Or is he merely being self-effacing in the face of youthful enthusiasm. No, of course not that.

Wescott finally quotes from the third blog what may actually signal a reprieve from the full force and fury of Professor Fish:

But whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play. Nothing ludic in what I do or try to do. I have a lot to answer for. [23-1-2012]

The burden of remaining true to the legacy of Fish weights so heavily on Fish that the ludic is eschewed. The true has been winnowed from the false, the relevant from the noise, the serious from "mere" play. Would were it only that easy for those of us operating below the demi-god level. We can look up "ludic" on our smart-phone, and we know there is a huge literature on "play," and it is not permitted for Fish to dismiss "play" as a cultural phenomenon imperiously as though no one could possibly object or arch an eyebrow.

I raise a finger only to point at Huzinga. Even a cursory acquaintance with his 1938 book and the controversies around its translation would make it hard to write the last couple of sentences quoted above without some self-irony or awareness which direction cats are generally stroked. Perhaps Huzinga can now be ignored in the lingering swan-song of post-modernism. Of course we are dealing with an extremely hardened ideology.

The good news it that digital humanities gets an unlimited hall pass good for the playground. No more hoisting of us with our own extensive petard collection. In other words, Fish will not disturb the play of children. He plans to suffer the little children.

Further down I shall look at the work of the "likes of" him (see the quote above), going for narrowing meaning generalized from some bi-labials and one near chiasmus in the Areopagitica with the likes of me, playing Peter Batke's properly purposeful processing personal perl program play pals applied aptly to bi-labials. Wow, 18 in a row, counting the glyphs. I feel uniquely qualified since I have both bi-labials in question in my name (in initial position!), supplemented by two glottal stops (medial!).

So let me also try my hand at sophism, playfully.

"Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays." (On the Aesthetic Education of Man — Friedrich Schiller) wiki

" [...] der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Worts Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt."  (Schiller)

There is a problem with the English version taken from wiki. It should really read:

"A human plays only where human in the full sense of the word and is completely human only where playing." (< This could also rate as a near chiasmus as does the original German - keep this for future reference.)

First, I think we can put back the place reference (wo) and lose the time reference (when), although I understand the motivation for the switch. We are translating rigidly formal German and should not produce English colloquially pliable. (<Tuck away this chiasmus.)

Second, at least lose the "he is a ..."; that is not "a word." English allows ellipsis: "... when in full meaning of the word man." If a literal soul should insist on the word "meaning," I would say, being fully aware of a word means being aware of its meaning. The context for that assumption is there, and the heaping of prepositional phrases is to be avoided. If a timid soul should still insist on the "he is" put on a menacing growl. He is in time and he is in place. Since this is a deeply linguistically poetic and personal moment, either works, the place is more true to the flavor of the original. Poetry trumps a narrow view of grammar.

Third, the German understanding of the need of an "anthropos" type word - "Mensch" - as an unambiguous collective for hairless bipeds of all sexes and dimorphic preferences, is superior to the English "man" as a part-time collective. Better philology emerging from Proto-Indo-European. There are perfectly good words in English for "anthropos" that are unambiguously collective and avoid referencing the class with a high testosterone level, statistically speaking. This does not mean that Schiller had thought of including women; this is only to meet the expectations of contemporary women. The current imperative of linguistic gymnastics to avoid gender reference has demanded new levels of virtuosity in writing.

Here is another attempt and then we can move on:

Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays. [tr. Sam Gill]

I don't like this translation. There is still the testosterone, statistically speaking, and there is a lack of trust in the word "human." Would "evolved hominid" be an improvement? Sam Gill has a respectable bibliography - Peirce, Gadamer, Bateson, but not Huzinga. I will drop this particular bit of flim-flammery.

So when Schiller rode his Trakehner to see Goethe to shoot some hoops, they became completely human. When they retired to a glass of Gewürztraminer to decide what is true or not, they become less than what they actually are, unless they played chess. I think this is a perfect example of sophism, I have found some quotes through googling to contradict some position; I have blown some smoke in all directions; I am ready to let the jury decide. There will always be reasonable doubt.

Where were we? It has been several decades since I have been at the MLA. I always thought of it as a try-out for the minor leagues, managers trying to fill assistant professor rosters. When I go my PhD in '79 it was still called a meat-market, and I did not go since there were no listings for positions in German, no demand for fresh meat in German. Yet 40 sessions on digital humanities does not seem than many when I think that there were many hundred sessions in all, back then, in the good old days; and today, people, some people anyway, do want to know what digital humanities is all about.

I mention this only to support the idea that we are dealing with a minor peeve of Prof. Fish and not with a full-blown research effort along the lines of Tony Grafton's (since partially at least recanted) '07-'09 charge at computing humanists starting in the New Yorker in '07. Prof. Fish does not appear to have activated his research capacities here beyond some minor googling.

The first blog is really a wistful look back into the happy days of yore by someone well past the date for Medicare registration, back to a time when he, Stanley Fish, set the tone at the MLA. There was no digital humanities back then at the MLA; there was Humanities Computing and IBM had a table with posters as had Apple and DEC, in the basement of the Hilton, mixed in with the publishers' displays. We were operating in complete obscurity, far from the gaze of the stars of Theory.

Of course, the first blog piece is dripping with irony, even sarcasm. There is a curious appeal for scientific rigor, or at least a strong complaint that literary criticism seems not to have changed much from work done in the 1930's or 1950's. If Astro-Physics has discarded the methods of the 1950's why not literary studies? Such random comments about science and literary studies does seem strange to someone even casually reading Husserl and Franz Brentano and several others who were acutely aware that science had left philosophy for good in the course of the 18th - 19th centuries. Of course, phenomenology is trying to chart an alternative path for expressions of spirit that could also be called science.

Incidentally, in the beginning of the 19th c., literary studies also left philosophy to embark on a quite rigorous search for source texts, for the roots of European languages and dialects and for chronologies and biographies and bibliographies, work that had not really been neglected; it had never been started. The idea was to do positive research. All these developments have been given names with a huge literature that was not happily received by the proponents of the iconoclasm Fish championed well over a hundred years later. The Fishians found plenty of work rediscrediting everything that had been discredited by history itself multiple times.

Despite my reading some of the post-WWII methodological discussion and my dissatisfaction of some directions, I have generally resisted placing text indexing as the universal solution, although I may have sinned in the heat of the argument but later genuinely repented. The disappearance of Marxism as a serious option for Germans and the recognition that their universities were sliding into underfunded mediocrity has given everybody some breathing-space, including dabbling in digital humanities in the venerated manner of Geisteswissenschaft.

Since Fish thinks of himself as the end of history, he does not have to bother with reading his own work in context or informing himself of the current. The Pillars of Fish stand.

That Stanley Fish should expect the progress of science in literary studies points to some gaps in his reading program. Some editor at the Times should have called a technical foul, but they are all logged in to ui.labor.state.ny. There has always been an emphasis on interpretation in Literary Studies this side of the ocean, something that even infected German Studies in America. I think Fish has benefited tremendously from this trend. Curious then that Prof. Fish should equate the avant-garde of 20 years ago with what has been called a paradigm shift in science methodologies. Some would think more of a stampede from Bedlam. The initiation of cohorts in the cultural traditions of this country and now of the globe, make real science based on the laws of nature not really viable for literary studies. That will have to come in the real sciences should they ever incline towards trying to understand what exactly is going on when Fish reads Milton.

Fish just misses his old friends: "multiculturalism, postmodernism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, neo-colonialism, [anti-]racism, racialism, feminism, queer theory, theory in general." [Fish, 26-12-2011] Yet, he is most irritated by the thought that postmodernism has run its course, and we are either in post-post-modernism or back in just plain modernism or just modern or even pre-modern, waiting for first contact and dabbling in digital humanities.

I think that "iconoclasm" has a well explored history in our culture, the Eurocentric West, which includes North America. It is curious to note that Fish's iconoclasts, who destroyed the images of our civilization in the oak paneled lecture rooms in Perkins library in the presence of members of the Duke Endowment, should think they were going to destroy the fabric of Western Civilization while accepting six-figure salaries in 1980 dollars. These iconoclasts have done their work, or are still doing it elsewhere; they have destroyed the icons of our civilization in their writing; they set fashion statements with all the shades of all-black, and they have mentored students to carry on their work and continue the all-black fashion. Nothing was really broken except a few fragile minds from their clique who could not deal with accepting assistant professorships at Princeton.

Their bibliographies have been cataloged in libraries although their presence on wiki could still stand a couple of hours of editing and augmentation. There is no doubt that the iconoclasts of the MLA in the 1980's raised their voices, in the words of Fish:

 "... old questions were revealed to be based on a mistaken belief in the stability of texts and the self-identity of authors; rock-solid procedures and methodologies were shown to rest on the shifting sands of history; canonical authors were dislodged from their pedestals and exposed as racists, misogynists and apologists for empire; the canon itself was condemned as an artifact of patriarchal politics; and the practitioners of traditional criticism (yesterday’s stars, today’s relics) were denounced for being complicit with every evil known to humankind." [26-12-2011]

The sad thing here is that among all this historical perspective there is a lack of historical perspective. Are we condemning Charles the First and the Cavaliers, the campaigns of the First and Second Civil War, are we going to condemn Cromwell, or Robespierre, or Kaiser Wilhelm, or Hitler, or Stalin, or Tamerlane, or Suleiman the Magnificent and all the scholars who worked during their collective tenure. Or are we cherry-picking evil, bringing history into the present to scare the comfortable bourgeois. Is it possible that someone can have become a relic in 2012 while having been a star as late as 1995, blog on The Opinionator notwithstanding. A real syndicated column would be nice, of course.

Postmodern iconoclasm was of short duration, but in the sense that valid issues of canon, social injustice, epistemological issues and all manner of other uncomfortable issues long ignored have some actual merit, that work will go on; it will be absorbed with a footnote, the diversity of American universities should guarantee that. Digital humanities can help.

So what are we to think of the beef of Stanley Fish with the MLA. Fish should have destroyed the MLA in the 80's. Rather than going after the canon, he should have gone after the institution. Burn the convention centers, do away with conferences, turn regional the MLA's into reeducation centers, rededicate the PMLA to post-colonialism, MLN to neo-colonialism and the MLS to the theory that ends in "r." And remove classification PQ, PR, PS and PT from libraries and the 800's; raise some hell, do some damage. The Fishian iconoclasm did little more than drive George Steiner to distraction and take him from more important work in order to hold the parapets against this faux assault.

So here it is now, early January 2012, the news of the day is that Fish is not going to the MLA and that he is unhappy with the program he will not see. Hardly any scary Marxism, nothing about ethereal satisfaction from manual manipulation during solitary reveries, nothing about post-colonial neo-colonialism, ... at all.

Yet Fish is unhappy with the MLA not only for sins of omission - but also for sins of commission. That chief sin is not only a boring program but an unwarranted emphasis on digital humanities.

He summarizes the digital humanities program, worth repeating:

 "... the organization and administration of libraries, the rethinking of peer review, the study of social networks, the expansion of digital archives, the refining of search engines, the production of scholarly editions, the restructuring of undergraduate instruction, the transformation of scholarly publishing, the re-conception of the doctoral dissertation, the teaching of foreign languages, the proliferation of online journals, the redefinition of what it means to be a text, the changing face of tenure — in short, everything." [Fish, 26-12-2011]

The summary is quite competent, puzzling are his objections. In what coconut grove in Florida has Prof. Fish been hiding for the last 10 years. Has he not noticed that every students has a smart phone running during all waking hours, has he not noticed that electronic media is everywhere - video, image and text, from Chaucer to Milton to Shakespeare and everything between and beyond both ends, all languages? Does the MLA have some obligation to acknowledge this fact on the ground? Yes? No? Maybe?

But here comes Prof Fish, the street brawler. He likes nothing so much as to walk into an academic lecture, put up his dukes and take out a couple of rows of sissies. Any methodological brave talk or appeal for aesthetic understanding will be met with a couple of jabs, a few uppercuts and a haymaker. That is how it was during the grand old days of "Theory." He assumes that we are all brawlers and that digital humanities is spoiling for a fight poised to get George Steiner up from his important work again.

Fish then proceeds to the burlesque caricature of MLA sessions, past and present. I sense he is at this desk thumbing through the program. Is it comical that someone is differentiating digital humanities from new media? I can still remember preferring New Media conferences sponsored by Apple to the ACH conference. The rest of  his derision will not really enrich our understanding.

To cut this short, Fish gives us two options, now that his favorites are favorites no longer, 1. silly, pointless digital humanities, all dressed up for lit. crit. (he surmises) with nowhere to go and 2. the same old same old stuff he had written papers on when he was an undergraduate. MLA? Forget about it.

The last paragraph tells us all about Prof. Fish's state of mind.

"But if there is to be hope, there must be a path it can travel; and if there is to be redemption, there must be a redeemer. Who or what shall it be? Again, according to the program, it can only be one thing — the digital humanities, which does make an appearance in some of the panels that pose the question of the profession’s health and survival. The digital humanities is the name of the new dispensation and its prophets tell us that if we put our faith in it, we shall be saved. But what exactly is it? And how will its miracles be wrought? The answers, or at least some answers, to those questions must wait for another column." [Fish 26-12-2011]

First, this is not a carefully crafted piece. It is a blog and by definition ephemeral to be discarded with the daily paper. And second, it can also contain random rhetorical flourishes that will supplement the effects of a triple shot latte in the morning.

But wait, oh my GOD, jumping Jehosaphat, this is digital. This is digital journalism, this is all part of digital humanities, Google will index it, this blog will be read long after the last copy of the Times from the first day after Christmas 2011 will have gone to recycling. This text in all its lexical linearity and factual obscurity will become part of Prof. Fish's bibliography with a hot link ready to sow confusion at a single click.

Digital Journalism has found what to do with all the stale news. All right, put the news in the archive along with the rumor and the contumely. Then get to indexing all the comments to the Fish blogs to make it unlikely that this bit of happy writing is taken too seriously, and finally take some time to find someone to defend digital humanities from this unreflected undeserved trashing. Hey, over here! I'm not busy.

Does Fish intimate that the progress of scholarship is a sequence of messiahs. Given his repeated professed need for inspiration from the transcendental realm, do prophets offer themselves who have that connection and are willing to share the light with the ordinary people walking about aimlessly? Is Fish one of these prophets who is upset that his channel is no longer in the MLA package deal. Was Father Busa a prophet? Is the Dartmouth Dante Project a joint venture of the shades of Jacopo and Singleton with Jesus as the P.I. and Hollander merely a medium? And is the MLA program really a road map for the divine intervention in lit. crit.? Where are we going with this? Should we even ask?

There is nothing wrong with seeking hope. Yet the logic from hope to miracles to a redeemer to digital humanities has a serious shimmy. It shakes and rattles, especially since digital humanities is being led to the bin where false prophets are discarded. The only message I can take away from Fish is that our hope, which we desperately so need and deserve so completely (<chiasmus) have been dashed by digital humanities, a usurper who has distracted the people with its trinkets from the splendor of post-modernism before Fish could lead post-modernism to complete its path across the firmament. Perhaps such bait and switch tactics have caused suspicion of sophistry.

He shows us hope and redemption, and he asks about a redeemer, but he defaults to the MLA program where he suspects redeemers are revealed. To tell the truth from my perspective, it sounds smooth, but it is vapid to the core. Embarrassing.

Words with emotional content lead to expectations until we realize that hope is being used ironically to show us how much we have erred abandoning the hope Fish offered us a decade ago.

For starters, although many people work in digital humanities, no one except some borderlines who are not taking their medication think digital humanities is the redeemer or the path to redemption. Prof. Fish has started to read badly; he projects his agenda into the words of others; he probably has made hay that way all along.

Then, not everyone has the same need for redemption, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Digital humanities is not a theological dispensation; it is a technological reality that has come to us through the development of the network and the universal acceptance of its tools by millions. If Fish wants to see the world in terms of dispensations, then "go for it;" he should however be clear that he is sowing confusion and mixing levels. I do understand the religious impulse, but I do not wear it 24/7 on the sleeve, especially not during meetings designing a data structure for rhetorical figures in Chrétien de Troyes. I have no faith in it except that we, the collective, can make it work for us and that we can understand it, much like the dispensation of the automobile a century earlier and the computer fifty years after that.

Also, development outside the academy have intruded in this case. Universities are merely trying to respond. The same was true of the initial introduction of the network a generation ago.

Finally, one should understand that it is a big world and that the Internet has facilitated access to written expressions of literally millions whose every passing thought is now in the index. There may be some hundreds thousands who share Fish's need for redemption, of these, perhaps a hundred may be digital humanists of indeterminate accomplishment. Yet, evaluating digital humanities requires more than picking one or two convenient quotes from the fringe out of a Google hit list. Separating wheat from chaff has become more important than ever. A healthy skepticism towards catchy phrases coupled with a hands-on understanding of whatever field is under consideration is required. Hand-on understanding is sadly missing in this bit of ephemera from Fish. Fortunately, we can recognize the gate crashers, no problem.

The prognosis for the next blogs, is not all that rosy. The professor promises to examine the miracle of digital humanities and how we shall be saved by it. I did hope, at my first reading of this first installment that this will turn out to be merely hyperbole, a rousing finish. Alas, it has turned out to be merely a forecast of some dreary and gray days ahead in the world of Stanley Fish.