Stanley Fish addresses in his blog this week the rising currency of "digital humanities" and its strong presence at the convention of the Modern Language Association -- an academic conference, he rightly implies, to which one goes expecting more faddism than scholarship. I have previously voiced concerns about this sub-discipline, and find myself largely in agreement with his assessment.
Stanley Fish addresses in his blog this week the rising currency of "digital humanities" and its strong presence at the convention of the Modern Language Association -- an academic conference, he rightly implies, to which one goes expecting more faddism than scholarship. I have previously voiced concerns about this sub-discipline, and find myself largely in agreement with his assessment.
The great German critic Walter Benjamin has said that the task of cultural historians is to brush against the grain of cultural presuppositions. If that is the case, and I think it is in many ways, then one of the presuppositions that we should unpack is a coupling of technological innovation and human progress. We find this narrative advanced in the supposed "Facebook Revolutions" that make us feel as though we're doing more than wasting time when we log on to social media. Or, more perniciously, in our uncritical acceptance of drone attacks, which advance the fiction of technology leading to warfare producing no unwanted casualties. The sense that technology is inherently a form of progress, rather than a platform for consumerism, is one of the most insidious ideologies of our time, and one that distracts us from meditating on the true sources of human flourishing. When digital humanists claim not to be a critical movement in the traditional sense while also and simultaneously advertising new vistas of humanistic study made possible by their work, they come rather too close to that ideology for my comfort.
For more: Feisal G. Mohamed: Can There Be a Digital Humanism?
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