MLA: Trendy Tribulations

MLA: Trendy Tribulations

Image of the seattle M L A Conference banner.

Starting today, approximately 8-12 thousand members of the Modern Language Association (MLA) will converge on Seattle, Washington, for the association's annual conference. Following Wikipedia, The MLA Convention consists of two main activities: it "is the largest and most important of the year for scholars of languages and literature; major university and many smaller college literature and language departments interview candidates for teaching positions at the convention," and it "features about eight hundred sessions, including presentations of papers and panel discussions on diverse topics (special sessions, forums, poetry readings, film presentations, interdisciplinary studies involving art and music, governance meetings) and social events hosted by English and language departments."

Upon the announcement of the various sessions, rabid prognosticators move into full-on tasseography mode, poring over the titles of various talks and panels in order to assess and pronounce the seemingly always-in-crisis "state of the discipline." As is to be expected, this MLA proves no different. On December 26, 2011, Stanley Fish published a blog post with the provocative title, "The Old Order Changeth."  In this entry, one of many in his always enjoyable series for the New York Times' Opinionator, Fish assesses this year's MLA program "to see what’s going on and what’s no longer going on in literary studies." What does he find? Much as there was once a time when "postmodernism in all its versions was the rage and every other session at the MLA convention announced that in theory’s wake everything would have to change," it seems a new, "rough beast has slouched into the neighborhood threatening to upset everyone’s applecart." What is this insurgent practice? "The [MLA] program’s statistics deliver a clear answer. 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."

Hidden behind the sudden emergence of Digital Humanities as the MLA topic du jour, Fish finds "two perennials — the fate of the profession and religion — are well-represented this year with just under 20 panels devoted to each." He finds "the fate-of-the-profession discussions are marked by a mixture of pessimism, defiance, whistling in the dark and a bit of panic," but he finds something approaching the opposite underlying the evergreen presence of panels and talks dealing with religion. "Religion is the location of, and for many the source of, renewal, aspiration, redemption and hope," he writes, and "the very fact that so many papers explore the intersection of literature and religion may be evidence that literary studies are attached to a value that will sustain them even in these hard times."

If there is "hope" for literary studies, Fish posits, "there must be a path it can travel; and if there is to be redemption, there must be a redeemer."  Perhaps with a great deal of snarky humor, Fish continues, "Who or what shall it be? Again, according to the program, it can only be one thing — the digital humanities."

I sense humor, because Fish closes, "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."

This ending rings a bit...well...hollow. Where postmodernism "inevitably...after an exciting period of turmoil and instability...was domesticated and absorbed into the mainstream, forming part of a new orthodoxy that would subsequently be made to tremble by a new insurgency," what, exactly, is the new orthodoxy of Digital Humanities? Fish has been a vocal proponent of the Digital Humanities projects in the past, but his praise has been securely tied to the fact that this emergent thing has bled humanist (and postmodernist) thinking into other fields. To read his previous writings, however, it appears what he is praising about Digital Humanities is not so much a new thing as it is its ability to accelerate the movement of postmodern methodology into other, non-literary disciplines.

Ted Underwood, professor of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature in the English department of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, echoes this in his response to Fish, titled "Why digital humanities isn’t actually 'the next thing in literary studies.'" Underwood's main argument: "DH [Digital Humanities] is not the kind of trend humanists are used to, which starts with a specific methodological insight and promises to revive a discipline (or two) by generalizing that insight." It is not, he writes, specific to the study of literature. Because of this, the claim that it will reinvigorate the connection between literature and its readers (something that the major postmodernisms did, and something Fish's odd jump from religious literary studies to the broad concept of a "hope," or "value," or what-have-you animating all literary studies indicates) is specious at best. Rather, as Fish's previous writing on Digital Humanities indicates, Underwood believes DH provides "new opportunities for collaboration both across disciplines and across the boundary between the conceptual work of academia and the infrastructure that supports and tacitly shapes it."

As Fish indicates and Underwood claims, DH is not necessarily something new. It is not necessarily a new way of looking at texts and interrogating their content, form, logic, ideology, etc. Rather, it is a new way of further extending previous methodologies. As a field, it does not necessarily hold water, because it hasn't, as those oft-discussed postmodernisms did, set new parameters for thinking through things.

Underwood's critique is further echoed in Feisal G. Mohamed's Huffington Post entry from December 28, 2011, "Can There Be a Digital Humanism?" Mohamed goes one step beyond Underwood, writing, "one of the presuppositions [of DH and its proponents] that we should unpack is a coupling of technological innovation and human progress...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."

It seems, then, that all that was once old is new again. I recall no other than Stanley Fish warning us, in an essay titled "What's New About New Media?" that "there is more to understanding what happens when people communicate through a given medium than merely ascertaining what level of accuracy and amount of data the exchange involves. This observation—that there is more than accuracy and amount to any exchange—comprises a founding rationale for the field of media studies, whether characterized aphoristically by Marshall McLuhan ('the medium is the message') or more recently expressed (and complicated) in Derridian terms, that the supplement—the 'specific characteristics of material media'—can never be 'mere' supplement; it is 'a necessary constituent of [any] representation.' To put it simply, looking for content apart from context just won't work." The newness of media forms and forms of looking at investigating do not matter apart from an interrogation of how they mean. Context is as key as content.

So far, Digital Humanities has done a lot of work enabling us to rearrange content. Its use of stylometric analysis, for example, has led to an increased accuracy in ascertaining authorship. This enabling has, by and large, allowed lingering questions already present in literary humanist endeavor to game a greater field with greater accuracy. We can mulch more information faster and with greater accuracy. But...lurking in the background of this new moment, one still finds the twin questions of content and context. We have neither reached a point where DH is shifting contexts, nor has it introduced new frames via which to assess the material world (or the literary world as it comes to represent the material) content that were not already in play.