BLOG2
[CITATION: 1-9-2012, The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality
By STANLEY FISH
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/the-digital-humanities-and-the-transcending-of-mortality/]


Beineke, Yale

In BLOG2, Prof. Fish has unpacked his A-Game and his Air Jordan XX3's. I should think that some unfavorable mail that found its way into his post-Christmas stocking was the motivation to elevate his game.

First, there were all the people who may have said that he should not blog about academic issues that rightfully belong in imprimatured discussions.

And then came all the perplexed digital humanists wondering what he was talking about. I mean, sheesh, honestly.

So the blog starts with a roar to reestablish dominion over the jungle. He reminds us that:

 "[...] in a professional life now going into its 50th year I have been building arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive and, most important, all mine." [Fish 9-1-2012]

That clause can serve as an apology for having stooped to blog, and blog not very definitively at that. When Frank Sinatra touched this theme, some swooned. When a professor of literature speaks in this manner about his or her scholarship, I would be tempted to check for the expiration dates of items on the library shelf. Yes, scholarship has an expiration date, examples abound, counter examples do not. Time to check the olfactory system. I am certainly not qualified to do that with Fish.

In a curious second paragraph, Fish accepts the fictional agenda of Morris Zapp as his own; yes, we have not forgotten even if we don't remember the details of 1970's satirical novels as well as he does. Fish characterizes his work as harmonizing with that of the fictional character Zapp.

1. "[...] to write about a topic with such force and completeness that no other critic will be able to say a word about it." [Zapp] 2. "... a desire for pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power ..." [Fish]

What a strange blast from the past, the 1970's. So we are to believe that Prof. Fish and his fictional persona have checked off several areas of English literature and theory (with a capital T) that we shall have to bother with no more, ever. We shall say: "Oh ... Fish has already done that." And this on the strength of what can only be called parodistic treatments of international academic stardom 40 years ago?

The second paragraph depends on the reading of the lexical item "to stand against." The crucial point is that "blogs" and digital humanities "stand against" the following: "... force, completeness, ... pre-eminence, authority etc." Digital humanities is a passing fad, a producer of ephemera; the work of Fish is forever. QED. And we thought inflating self-esteem was a recent phenomenon.

Perhaps the logic is skewed here by putting disparate things - blogs and digital humanities - in the same term. What may be true of blogs may not be true of digital humanities? Duh! Oh, bother....

I do have a lingering suspicion that I do not appreciate some irony here. Is he being ironical about blogging. Yet if he insists that his work is "all his," and most importantly just "all his," at what point did these "decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive" arguments spring fully formed from the Fishian brow? Do they still spring forth? Did one just spring forth?

I have read the lectures of Heidegger, perhaps I should say I have read at the lectures of Heidegger from his first in 1919 to his last in the 1940's. There is no doubt that the freshly minted professor was trying things out - over the years - trying out philosophical vocabulary, minting technical terms, exploring readings and translations of Aristotle, the list goes on. The published lectures show that he had good days and better days. There is no doubt that "Sein and Zeit" is an unfinished, perhaps failed work, perhaps the work of a philosopher doing what in other times and contexts would be the work of a prophet. Heidegger exhibited development and recognized the development of his thought. And still he never lost an argument, ever.

As I look down the list of Fish's books I wonder at the lack of modesty. His admirers do chart a consistent theory of reading through the texts that he takes up. I have no problem with the idea that the readings of Renaissance texts as practiced in the 30's or 50's needed to be rethought. I understand that the scholars of the last 200 years who were infected with all sorts of mores and unreflected ideologies must be reread in a better light. I understand that an "Old Order" was broken, partly by the demographics of the post-WWII baby boom, partly by the extraordinary trauma of World Wars, partly by ideologies fighting cultural hegemonies, partly by the decline of military colonialism, partly by a normal passing of generations, and partly, or mostly, it seems by the brilliance and determination of Prof. Fish and his apostles.

Perhaps he will become a force to be reckoned with through time. But he cannot want everyone to be like Stanley. Nobody wanted to be like Mike when he was playing for the Wizards or when he was playing golf. When Prof. Fish remembers all the glorious moments he must have had reading texts, he must think that no one has ever done it as well as he has. Whatever digital humanities may want to become as a Fish surrogate due to malfeasance by the MLA program committee, their efforts will be abjectly ludicrous until the second incarnation of Fish shall again walk the earth.

Is it possible that his blog announces some kind of second coming? It just does take one's breath away. So we are referred back to the Fish corpus, and we are to treat the current blog only as a pointing device. The actual current blogged words, although written by Fish himself, do still "stand against" apodictic permanence i.e. cannot transmit all that power and comprehensive, monumental, definitive his-ness. I think the blogger should not chide his or her instrument - the presence has been revealed, existentially speaking.

A jaundiced, undeconstructed pedestrian view would maintain that digital humanities and blogs stand against the chest-beating war cries of the fictional Zapps and the aggrandized amplification of the self-evaluation by the corporeal Fishes. Yet Fish blogs today. So we do not really have to worry about what was meant to be conveyed and what was actually conveyed and what bits may have lodged in my personal awareness, according to Fish.

I am not alone in the desire to hear more from Prof. Fish on this  (Not!!), but he segues conveniently to a recent book published by one of the principals in MediaCommons. This is a bit of a dodge. Fish can pick up snatches of her book and conveniently can be current in the most current. For shame. Then he can take us for a couple of laps into his well-worn theories of what is text and what is not and we don't really know precisely what is Fish and what is not. He ends up with: "Well its all religious and political, is it not?" [Fish, 9-1-2012] Back on firm ground in his world.

I suspect Fish is trampling another straw dog. He juxtaposes the absolute power of the author in quest of originality with a collectivist vision of text with links. Fitzpatrick is the victim here made ridiculous by Fish's praise. Read it yourself. Am I right? Or what?

What is missing here is an admission by Fish that he does not understand everything. I know, what a stupid thought. He understand everything, and his eye-balls over printed text is all he needs. Some of us do need help. We find interactive query interfaces helpful in exploring texts. Some of us can only read, cover to cover, at the most 10 books a week - that is only 500 books a year, five thousand books a decade, twenty-five thousand books in an illustrious career festooned with honors. I am being sarcastic here, a thousand max, lifetime, exceptions noted. Some of us think text searching would allow us to cover more ground. If we are to advance away from silly ideologies and I count some of Fish's brainchildren among them, we must get beyond building ideological bunkers based on insufficient data acquired through reading a handful of books. I know it can be done, but let us not do it.

It is so hard to find a sentence you might have read last week although you may have integrated the book perfectly in your ideological ramparts. What to do? Find a digital humanist to find it for you in Gutenberg. Just where, in Jude the Obscure, did Jude lean against the gate and cry bitterly? Can Fish find it for me? I can, without leaving the couch, in seconds. How marvelous to have hundreds of thousands books a few clicks away. How marvelous to be able to click through the collections of the worlds museums. Students in Fish's cohort had dark grayscale images that would barely show the outline of the actions.

Fish has built the perfect interpretive tool between his ears. He judges the work of digital humanities against the greatness of the interpretations in his mind. What we really see is a terrible muddle. Digital humanities is not rocket science, some of the indexing math excepted, it is not religion, it is not about saving the world, it is about preserving cultural artifacts. If someone wins the Nobel Prize for humanities scholarship and happens to be a digital humanist, then let us applaud with decorum. Wait... there is no Nobel Prize for humanities scholarship. If Fish's eye-balls are such an excellent perceptive tool, why has he not written a book about computers explaining the phenomenon to the rest of us and how much worse libraries are now than when he was a graduate student. Instead he forces us to deny and deflect the most scurrilous insinuations from beyond the left field fence, couched in obfuscating jargon, scary. How can you defend these characterization? Just pretend this is normal in theory. Perhaps this would explains his fascination with the law. Wait... that IS the law.

The few paragraphs in the middle of blog2 Fish sing the praises of mortality. We have a beginning middle and end - that makes us like stories and arguments. We end with a completed thought or a conclusion. This is of course pretty nonsensical on its face. Yes, there will be quite a few who will look at the story of Fish and mutter something. However in the area of logistics of knowledge the next shift will punch in. That makes the electronic 24/7 systems guilty of hubris.

Libraries do not have a beginning, middle and end. They have to collect what was left of all the discrete Fishes that have left a record over the last 6,000 years. Seems obvious to me, that is where I grew up.

Fish prefers his locality. His discrete situation. He prefers to reproach excessive enthusiasm now that his horses all seem to have run out of gas, and he is ready to proclaim the end of time, just in time. Good for him to have grasped it all. Thanks for warning us away from trudging on. Basically, truth be told, its Miller time in the humanities. Thank you very much indeed.

It is a line of writing that I have little stomach for. Not all of us have spent a lifetime being right in every argument. Many of us have avoided argument, or at least avoided argument as the only program, and declined the pointlessness of being always right, especially when faced with rapidly evolving technologies that would transform our world whether we can beat someone over the head with our vision or not. In my own work in technology from the 1970's to the present, there has not been an eight month period that did not bring forth some new development that would have to be understood, integrated, used to advantage in some humanities project even if it had to be discarded soon or replaced by something that could not be predicted. I learned to make learning the program. My payoff was a consistent knowledge base on important technology, verifiable and dependable.

I was once a virtuoso with acoustic couplers. I once gave a lecture on teaching "Amheric With a Computer" out of a phone booth with the audience gathering around on the carpet, my PC sitting on a bar stool. I still know much about modems although I have not seen one in 20 years. I had to learn to strip coax cable to set up a network of PC's with 10 MB hard-drives. It was fun, it was challenging and it was relentless. Now I am sitting on a park bench in Meran, not too cold encased in down, just lit a Cuban and my laptop is connected to the municipal city-wide wifi; I am writing a blog, finishing e-mail, checking the weather in the Alto Adige, fixing a perl program and watching the play-by-play of the Carolina game that started at noon in the US. Getting from then to now meant the many people put in many hours.

In contrast, the literary canon would always patiently hold still for a bashing; the linearity of texts - despite referential ambiguities - would offer up all manner of evil for those looking for it. Would Aristotle have been less of a racists, as he surely was, had the Greeks submitted more gracefully to slavery themselves rather than preferring to enslave barbarians (their word, their bad) of many races. Were the Romans less racist because they enslaved in their galleys all men (sorry, private club) who could pull an oar, regardless of race, creed and national origin. I do not want to make light of racism and slavery in antiquity, or make light of man's cruelty to humanity through the ages all the way to today; as a European I personally accept responsibility on behalf of my ancestors, although some were legitimate victims some generations ago.

I do want to call into question the reading of texts according to modern ethical imperatives.

Not all practitioners have the dialectic virtuosity of Fish in this kind of criticism. So much junk was produced, not all of which should be dumped on his doorstep. Aristotle does not belong in the pillory, he belongs in the index of philosophy, and shame on those who encourage others to throw over-ripe fruits and vegetables. Of course, the texts "produced" by the Fishian deconstruction crews do not have such a narrow path to meaning as do Aristotle's texts, for example, those taken apart by the hard hats, disassembling concepts in texts written long before the concepts had been coined. This is not to say that good work has not been done on the slavery debate in the 18th and 19th c., and in antiquity, leading to the complete repudiation of the practice in the West, in theory at least. But I digress.

When Prof. Fish arrived at Duke, Duke Humanities Computing was engaged in working through several large grants that would have been the envy of some science departments. We were working on non-Roman glyphs, capabilities of graphics cards, multi-media steered by computers, lesson delivery, digitization, data-base design, text indexing, interface design and a raft of projects with Duke faculty concerning their particular research. There was never a hint that we would have anything to offer the superstar. We survived in obscurity working with individuals in all departments, and we even got most everybody in Allen Hall to renumber their own footnotes.

Yet we could see the power of technology grow, not to furnish us with a manifesto to demonstrate our pre-eminence, but to think up ways to apply these tools to the work before us and our clients. We did not know it, but in a few years Stanford graduate students would index the web and field millions queries daily in every language.

That discussions about digital humanities at the MLA have to happen is clear; yet, we do not all have to be there if it is too painful. That Prof. Fish has to decide whether digital humanities is left or right shows only the limits of his own ideologies which no one will want to take away from him. That wiki and others shut down their sites to influence Congress should give Prof. Fish some material about political action for future blogs. That Congress scurried back to committee so quickly is unusual. Perhaps the tyranny of Mickey and the Ducks is finally cracking.

I am afraid his grasp of the field reaches only to a cursory glance at some web publications, would that he had enough familiarity to write a serious piece, NOT. Today, the methodologies of digital humanities give us such easy access to texts through key-word searching and interfaces to data-bases. Not everyone can resist that, bravo.

Again, we have to fast forward to the end, the tedium of reading this piece closely with commentary would be too much to bear. Skim the pages yourself. Or not.

After some paragraphs of letting lesser luminaries degrade digital humanities to community college level status, and while lamenting the general decline of higher education of which digital humanities is but one symptom, Fish descends to reasonableness.

 "... I have still said nothing at all about the “humanities” part of digital humanities. Does the digital humanities offer new and better ways to realize traditional humanities goals? Or does the digital humanities completely change our understanding of what a humanities goal (and work in the humanities) might be?" [Fish 9-1-2012]

The reasonable role grants the possibility for digital humanities of "new and better" or of "completely change." What strange obsession with imperatives and absolutist positions. How does that play in the law. Forget I asked. Had Prof. Fish let his mouse wander just a few clicks he might have gotten a realistic glimpse of just what digital humanists are working on. So we have a great savant, in the role of the novice, we have the uninformed writing to other uninformed novices in a blog. Prof. Fish should be quite angry with himself if his self-esteem rating could be dialed back to allow that.

In the last paragraph Fish enlists Prof. McGann of UVA to do his heavy lifting. He quotes a ten year old sentence of McGann laying out the challenges for technology in higher education. McGann has a long history in Humanities Computing - it is disingenuous to use a thoughtful sentence reflecting on the challenges in his field as a springboard for Fish's uninformed skepticism. Better Fish had browsed through McGann's work in Digital Humanities rather than cite a snippet in inappropriate context.

Or how about investigating web sites on Cuneiform Tablets, Greek pottery, on Early Christian Codices, Chaucer Manuscripts, Persian Book Illustrations, Italian murals. Or how about spending some time with the Dartmouth Dante project and engaging in some detailed study of Dante commentaries through the centuries?

Prof. Fish may have reached his "non plus ultra," he has set the Pillars of Stanley Fish, the demarcation of what Fish has known better than it had ever been known before. Yet the "non plus ultra" had become the slogan of Spanish explorers who sought and found the new world. There I go, Vasco de Peter. Sorry, what I meant is: the work goes on.

Is the digital representation of Trajan's Column better than the printed pages of the cartoons from which it has been studied for the last few centuries? It is certainly more convenient and will reach more people. In addition, the story arcs are easier to demonstrate. Had the Fishian mind seen the plaster cast at the Victoria and Albert Museum and been able to get the curator to allow him to climb around on a ladder would he have had one of his definitive moments? Would all of Roman military history have been distilled for him in the glimpse of a single plaster image of a Roman soldier's salute. Could he get the same effect form one of the folios of the cartoons? Could he have such a definitive moment with the McMaster data-base on a really nice large monitor? Would such an experiment open a skylight on the Fishian pate.

Will we ever know? Will no one from his circle show him? I am disappointed that the digital humanist did not rip hip blogs apart more thoroughly.