Paper for Marxism and New Media

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on 21 January 2012 by Ben

Here is my paper for the Marxism and New Media conference at Duke this weekend. It largely overlaps with my recent MLA paper, but it is rather different in many respects as well so I will just put the whole thing up despite the repetition. In any case, I am trying to beat it into shape for a more formal publication venue.

The Political Economy of Digital Media and Education

Benjamin J Robertson

First, let me shill for ebr and ask anyone who is interested in submitting their paper to us for publication to speak to me at lunch or later today. You can also find me online, on Twitter, etc.

Second, let me say that this is perhaps the worst paper title I have ever come up with.

This paper is a continuation of one that I gave at MLA two weeks ago, with a much better, if less informative title: “Digital Anamnesis.” My aim for that paper, and for this, is to think through my hesitation with regard to the new, history, form, and meaning. Briefly put, and not saying anything new as yet I think, I value new forms and processes of discourse, ones that seek to overcome limitations inherited from the past in order to make meaning in new ways. These forms and processes would have to, perhaps, ignore history and the methods of meaning making it affords us. However, I also value history, however problematic, insofar as it allows us to contextualize, understand, and make judgments about the new. In my MLA paper, and with further elaboration here, I consider received forms and processes of scholarship, especially as such scholarship (which is being challenged by digital media) operates within a political economy of academic employment and instruction and intellectual discourse. My concern, specifically, has to do with the manner in which the discourse surrounding what we still call the job market has been inflected by the advent and valorization of the so-called digital humanities. Dh has, it seems to me, implicitly promised young scholars jobs if they are able to write code, create databases, or otherwise interact with networked computers in an expert manner, often by prioritizing alternative academic, or alt-ac, careers. My purpose is not to argue against the value of DH broadly, but to question how DH or new media interacts with and informs the political economy of academic instruction, production, and employment in the humanties.

My MLA paper was part of a panel organized by David Golumbia: “Digital Literary Studies: When Will it End?” which has the distinction of being name-checked by Stanley Fish in a New York Times op-ed. Given where we are, and the appositeness of Fish’s comments on the MLA convention generally in the context of this paper, I will start with him as a way into my argument. Fish tells us that he cannot attend MLA, but that he has read the program and can therefore weigh in on its shortcomings, which, it turns out, are legion. He writes, “I was pleased to see that the program confirmed an observation I made years ago: while disciplines like physics or psychology or statistics discard projects and methodologies no longer regarded as cutting edge, if you like the way literary studies were done in 1950 or even 1930, there will be a department or a journal that allows you to proceed as if nothing had happened in the last 50 or 75 years.” Ignoring that session titles are rarely useful for understanding what sessions are actually about or the directions they might take, we can see here Fish, apparently at any rate, critiquing his (former?) profession for failing to advance. In some respect, he is no doubt correct. I recall Michael Berube writing somewhere that most undergraduate courses are methodologically organized by practices of close reading and simple historicism. These practices, in fact, still dominate if silently, I think, even more advanced humanistic discourse. As I hope to make clear, I am rather perplexed by the question of what to do about this “failure” to move forward with new practices of reading, writing, and thinking.

In any case, Fish then goes on to reminisce about how everyone used to talk about postmodernism (which seems to be a proxy for “theory” broadly), but no one does anymore. So, it seems we do move on, but not in the manner that Fish wants or expects. He writes: “What happened then, and inevitably, was that after an exciting period of turmoil and instability, the alien invader was domesticated and absorbed into the mainstream, forming part of a new orthodoxy that would subsequently be made to tremble by a new insurgency.” It’s not at all clear what Fish’s point is here, whether he wants a continued instability or is happy to see it pass.

And, finally, we get to what is for my purposes the point, Fish’s criticism of digital humanities, or new media studies, or whatever you want to call it—the new insurgency before which the now staid and neutered postmodernism-informed profession trembles. DH is the “rough beast” that has replaced postmodernism as the destabilizing force that threatens “what we do.” As an aside: it seems to me the height of ignorance to equate postmodernism (which has been variously understood as a theoretical position, a style, and a historical period) with digital humanities (which seems to be becoming a methodological position, but has been understood more as a practical, pedagogical, and sometimes theoretical engagement with the hardware and software that increasingly dictate the manner and scope of our practices). Nevertheless, DH is Fish’s target, and he writes:

Once again, as in the early theory days, a new language is confidently and prophetically spoken by those in the know, while those who are not are made to feel ignorant, passed by, left behind, old. If you see a session on “Digital Humanities versus New Media” and you’re not quite sure what either term means you might think you have wandered into the wrong convention. When the notes explaining the purpose of a session on “Digital Material” include the question “Is there gravity in digital worlds?”, you might be excused for wondering whether you have become a character in a science fiction movie. And when a session’s title is “Digital Literary Studies: When Will it End?”, you might find yourself muttering, “Not soon enough.”

And here is the question: does this “not soon enough” reveal a longing to return to the proper practices of humanistic discourse or a longing for the incorporation of DH into those practices in such a way that it becomes part of the new orthodoxy? It seems uncontroversial to state that theory or postmodernism has transformed the profession, whether positively or negatively. Maybe no one “does” theory the way they use to, but we need look no further than the title of the recent collection Theory after “Theory” to recognize that its legacy remains. Is this “theory” a domesticated one, one that has lost its power to subvert as a result of our acceptance of it? I certainly cannot answer that question. Rather, in the remainder of this paper, I will address what I see as Fish’s hesitation in the face of digital media as a transformative force in the humanities in order to open up a discussion of the political economy of our profession.

To that end, I begin with Bernard Stiegler and his work on anamnesis.

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Bibliography of Bernard Stiegler’s work in English to date (thanks to Daniel Ross)

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , on 16 January 2012 by Ben

Courtesy of Daniel Ross’ Twitter stream (and with his permission), here is a complete list of Bernard Stiegler’s work translated into English. Many of these translations are by Ross (notably 1, 2, 3, and 8). Not included here are several unpublished works. Also, I have added links to certain texts (namely, several of the collections).

A giant thanks to Ross for doing the actual heavy lifting here and for letting me post that work. Given my current Stiegler focus, and the fact that I plan to teach a class on his work (along side McLuhan and Flusser) in the fall, this bibliography is most timely and useful to me. I hope it is to you too.

For more on Ross, who directed the wonderful film The Ister and wrote Violent Democracy, see his Wikipedia page.

And here it is:

  1. Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out (Stanford University Press): http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=16155
  2. Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy (Polity Press): http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745648033
  3. Bernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, Disbelief and Discredit, volume 1 (Polity Press): http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745648095
  4. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford University Press): http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=2333
  5. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation (Stanford University Press): http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=876
  6. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (Stanford University Press): http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17078
  7. Jacques Derrida & Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (Polity Press): http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745620367
  8. Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (Stanford University Press): http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17590
  9. Bernard Stiegler, “Desire and Knowledge: The Dead Seize the Living”: http://arsindustrialis.org/desire-and-knowledge-dead-seize-living
  10. Bernard Stiegler, “The Digital as Bearer of Another Society”: http://www.capgemini.com/insights-and-resources/by-publication/digital-transformation-review-no-1-july-2011/
  11. Bernard Stiegler, “Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-based Capitalism and Libidinal Dis-economy,” New Formations 72 (2011): 150–61.
  12. Bernard Stiegler, “The Pharmacology of the Spirit,” in Jane Elliott & Derek Attridge (eds.), Theory After ‘Theory’ (Routledge): http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415484190/
  13. Bernard Stiegler, “Take Care”: http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2925
  14. Bernard Stiegler, “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: The Memories of Desire,” in Arthur Bradley & Louis Armand, Technicity: http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2925
  15. Bernard Stiegler, “The Carnival of the New Screen,” in Pelle Snickars & Patrick Vonderau, The YouTube Reader: http://www.kb.se/dokument/Aktuellt/audiovisuellt/YouTubeReader/YouTube_Reader_052009_Endversion.pdf
  16. Bernard Stiegler, “Derrida and Technology,” in Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: http://ebooks.cambridge.org/ebook.jsf?bid=CBO9780511483134
  17. Bernard Stiegler, “Knowledge, Care, and Trans-Individuation: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler,” Cultural Politics 6 (2010): 150–70.
  18. Bernard Stiegler, “The Magic Skin; or, The Franco-European Accident of Philosophy after Jacques Derrida,” Qui Parle 18 (2009): 97–110.
  19. Bernard Stiegler, “Bernard Stiegler’s Pharmacy: A Conversation,” Configurations 18 (3) (2010): 459–76.
  20. Bernard Stiegler, “The Industrial Exteriorization of Memory,” in Mitchell & Hansen (eds.), Critical Terms for Media Studies: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo4126130.html
  21. Bernard Stiegler, “New Industrial Temporal Objects,” in Earnshaw et al. (eds.), Frontiers of Human-Centred Computing: http://www.springer.com/computer/hci/book/978-1-85233-238-9
  22. Bernard Stiegler, “Persephone, Oedipus, Epimetheus,” Tekhnema 3 (1996): 69-112.
  23. Bernard Stiegler, “Technics, Media, Teleology: Interview with Bernard Stiegler,” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (7–8) (2007): 334–41.
  24. Bernard Stiegler, “Technics of Decision: An Interview,” Angelaki 8 (2003): 151–67.
  25. Bernard Stiegler, “Technoscience and Reproduction,” Parallax 13 (4) (2007): 29–45.
  26. Bernard Stiegler, “Telecracy Against Democracy,” Cultural Politics 6 (2010): 171–80.
  27. Bernard Stiegler, “Teleologics of the Snail: The Errant Self Wired to a WiMax Network,” Theory, Culture & Society 26 (2–3) (2009): 33–45
  28. Bernard Stiegler “The Theater of Individuation: Phase-Shift and Resolution in Simondon and Heidegger,” Parrhesia: http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia07/parrhesia07_stiegler.pdf
  29. Bernard Stiegler, 36. “This System Does Not Produce Pleasure Anymore: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler,” Krisis: http://krisis.eu/content/2011-1/krisis-2011-1-05-lemmens.pdf
  30. Bernard Stiegler, “Transcendental Imagination in a Thousand Points,” New Formations 46 (2002): 7–22.
  31. Bernard Stiegler, “Biopower, Psychopower and the Logic of the Scapegoat”: http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2924
  32. Bernard Stiegler, “Constitution and Individuation”: http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2927
  33. Bernard Stiegler, “Contempt”: http://www.cultureactioneurope.org/component/content/article/548-le-mepris-contempt?lang=en
  34. Bernard Stiegler, “Nanomutations, Hypomnemata and Grammatisation”: http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2937
  35. Bernard Stiegler interviewed by Irit Rogoff, “Transindividuation”: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/transindividuation/
  36. Bernard Stiegler, “Within the Limits of Capitalism, Economizing Means Taking Care”: http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2922
  37. Bernard Stiegler, “Spirit, Capitalism and Superego”: http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2928
  38. Bernard Stiegler, “The Tongue of the Eye: What ‘Art History’ Means,” in Khalip & Mitchell (eds.), Releasing the Image (Stanford): http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17340
  39. Bernard Stiegler, The Re-enchantment of the World (forthcoming): http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=158826
  40. Bernard Stiegler, Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals, Disbelief and Discredit, volume 2 (Polity, forthcoming).
  41. Bernard Stiegler, in Tom Cohen (ed.), Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1 (forthcoming): http://openhumanitiespress.org/telemorphosis.html
  42. Bernard Stiegler, “The True Price of Towering Capitalism: Bernard Stiegler Interviewed,” Queen’s Quarterly 114 (2007): 340–350.

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MLA 12 paper: Digital Anamnesis

Posted in papers on 6 January 2012 by Ben

Here is my paper from session 87, Digital Literary Studies: When Will it End?

Thanks to David Golumbia for organizing it and to my co-speaker John Zuern.

The end of this (after the 1st 2 sections of the last section) get a bit “draft-y” or perhaps “notes-y”. I am working on that stuff, having to do with the political economy of academic instruction and production, for the upcoming Marxism and New Media conference at Duke.

Digital Anamnesis

Introduction

This paper grows out of my ongoing concern with how we produce the future rather than the futuristic, how we produce a to-come that is not merely an extension of the past. I have for the past several years been thinking of this issue in the context of the mashup, a form of sonic collage that remixes the music from one song with the vocals from another. I’ve been thinking about how the logic of mashup, and that of the playlist, changes our relationship to the archive of recorded human knowledge, that knowledge that Bernard Stiegler understands to be stored within what he calls, following Husserl, tertiary retentions. He also refers to this recording as hypomnesis, or memory outside of memory.

This remix logic, creates a new human disposition towards the archive. Instead of historical knowledge, in which information is disposed in its wider synchronic and diachronic contexts, the archive now presents to us what Garageband calls loops, Vilem Flusser calls particles, and Stiegler might call grams: small bits of information whose purpose is not to exist according to historical dispositions, but rather to be disposed in new arrangements without regard for such contexts. I am not sure if these rearrangements do, in fact, break with the past, if they create a future that is not the futuristic no matter how startling the juxtapositions they manifest. Nonetheless, I continue to hope for such a possibility even as I am concerned about what would happen to historical meaning and thereby sanctioned knowledge practices when everything becomes a mashup, playlist, or remix. With regard to a future that is not futuristic I remain in a state of hesitation. If we break with the past, how will we understand the future? Of course, that I even ask this question, that such a question remains my concern, indicates the extent to which I am and likely will remain unable to actually break with the past, indicates the extent of my hesitation.

Thus, I turn to the paper at hand, and shift from the mashup to practices of knowledge production and sanctioning in academia. And to be clear, I do not mean to simply equate mashups with scholarship except insofar as they are both practices of meaning-making and insofar as they both involve, at this present date, new media technologies. So, I will do two things today and point towards a third. First, I will discuss Bernard Stiegler’s engagement with Plato’s concept of anamnesis in order to further elaborate the problem of the new and the manner in which that new threatens knowledge practices, especially for Stiegler. Second, I will tie this discussion to the section in the recent issue of Profession on evaluating digital scholarship. Finally, and most briefly, I will suggest that this discussion might be elaborated by thinking of it as a discussion of a political economy of academic instruction and production.

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Zielinski on Academia, Media, and the Future

Posted in Uncategorized on 3 January 2012 by Ben

This quote probably won’t make the final cut for my MLA 2012 paper. Too long, and more suggestive than providing any real ground for argumentation. But it does suggest the danger I am trying to articulate about placing our faith in media per se. Moreover, Zielinski’s thoughts on “the deep time of media” and the manner in which media is “deeply inhuman” (from which Jussi Parrika commences in Insect Media), suggest that any attempt we make to draw “new media” into the political economy of traditional academia (via peer review, by “counting it like a book” for T&P, by reading it with old methodologies, or by inserting it into an ill-conceived genealogy) will be problematic and ignore any possible future-that-is-not-the-past. In my paper I will tie this issue to Stiegler’s long vs. short circuits (as conceived in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations) and to debates about digital work in the context of T&P.

In any case, here Zielinski writes, with regard to the “inflation” of the definitions of “media” in the 1990s:

Media and future became synonymous. If you didn’t engage with what was then baptized media, you were definitely passé. By adding media to their curriculum, institutes, faculties, academies, and universities all hoped to gain access to more staff and new equipment. In the majority of cases, they actually received it—particularly after, in association with the magic word digital, media systems were established that the decision makers did not understand. This was another reason they called the process a revolution. The digital became analogous to the alchemists’ formula for gold, and it was endowed with infinite powers of transformation. (32)

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More baseball stuff: blogs and sportswriting

Posted in Uncategorized on 29 December 2011 by Ben

One of the major components of my Baseball and American Culture class will be student blogs. That’s nothing special, of course, as blogs have been in classrooms and classes for years. And, of course, the blog form is dead now (several times over). Nonetheless, the blog form has transformed the way in which we write, talk, and think about baseball, with the bloggers being the proverbial barbarians at the gate the poor old beat and feature writers must hold off lest we discover that David Eckstein was at best a mediocre baseball player. The tragedy that would be.

In any case, in addition to reading three novels (DeLillo’s Underworld, Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association. . ., and Roth’s The Great American Novel), two non-fiction baseball books (Moneyball and the recently published Cambridge Companion to Baseball), and one book of theory (Barthes’s Mythologies), we will be reading lots of sportswriting. Students must use Google Reader (or a similar RSS Reader–and if blogs are dead, what about RSS, amirite?) to follow blogs, mainly of their own choosing. I have required them to follow four particular blogs, listed here, and made suggestions on several others.

This list is not at all comprehensive. In fact, it’s rather idiosyncratic. There is much here that is quibble-able, but as always it’s place to start.

So here are the instructions.

Here are some suggestions for blogs to follow in Google Reader. You should subscribe to the “Required” blogs and feel free to pick and choose among the rest and find blogs on your own to follow (eg blogs related to your favorite team; try using Google to find other blogs, or ask me if you have an interest in a particular team). Links here often go directly to the blogs RSS or Atom feed. Plug them directly into Google Reader’s subscription function.


Note: you do not have to read every post of every blog you subscribe to. You should read several per day from these various blogs in order to become familiar with contemporary discourses on baseball and to generate ideas for your own blog writing.


Required

Sportswriter extraordinaire. Posnanski publishes several times per week, often about baseball (but also about golf, football, and other topics). He is conversant with stats, but is more interested in telling good stories that conform to the record (rather than creating myths based on nostalgia). Posts are very long, but are often among the best writing you will see on a given day.

Not really a blog. Users submit links at BBTF and thereby generate a place for people to congregate to discuss the news of the day. You can find most of these stories written at or linked from other blogs listed here. The real value of this feed is the comments section at each story, which is almost always intelligent and provides a great deal of insight into various baseball stories from widely divergent points of view (including wdiely diverging statistical points of view).

Group blog hosted by NBC. Some stats, but mainly discussion of the news of the day. Comment section can be interesting at times. Craig Calcaterra and Aaron Gleeman are not to be missed. Multiple posts per day (sometimes up to 25) on all aspects of baseball news.

Neyer was one of the very first baseball writers to work in an online-first capacity. He posts multiple times per day (and also forwards other posts from the MLB part of SB Nation that he finds interesting). Covers most aspects of MLB. Statistically oriented, but not a statistician. Neyer is more interested in thinking about baseball narratives and how numbers can refute or suppost those narratives.

Other

A statistically oriented blog for statistically minded readers. Publishes at most once per day long, often essay-like posts.

Statistical coverage on a day to day as well as a long term basis. Stories about individual players, teams, contracts, general baseball business, etc. Publishes Multiple posts per day, so short and others medium to long.

Formerly Rob Neyer’s baby. Similar to Fangraphs, but less wonky with regard to stats. Multiple posts per day, often short to medium length. Covers all aspects of baseball.

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Course materials for Baseball and American Culture

Posted in Teaching, Uncategorized on 29 December 2011 by Ben

Here are the course materials for my Spring 2012 course on Baseball and American Culture. Not quite as complete at this stage as the materials for my course on fantasy–I’ve yet to write the assignments for the midterm paper and the final project, but that’s the usual case at this stage.

Enjoy.

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Course materials for Fantasy After Tolkien

Posted in Teaching on 28 December 2011 by Ben

Here are the course materials for my Spring 2012 Modern and Contemporary Literature course, Fantasy after Tolkien.

The syllabus includes course policies, grading information, and CU boilerplate stuff on disabilities, etc.

The Daily Schedule lists due dates for readings, papers, and quizzes.

The Text List lists. . . err. . . texts.

I have also included here the prompts for the course’s six short writing assignments (of which the students will complete three of their choice). I have created all six assignments ahead of time to give the course some shape and to allow students to look ahead and think about which writing tasks most interest them.

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Nine theses on teaching with technology

Posted in Teaching on 26 December 2011 by Ben

The following theses come out of my experience with a faculty seminar at CU Boulder on the subject of Teaching with Technology sponsored by Arts and Sciences Support of Education Through Technology (ASSETT). I do not claim any sort of comprehensiveness nor exhaustiveness. There are further things to be said and any number of issues that I have ignored. I do not claim that any of these theses are correct or proven; they are places to begin.

1. We always “teach with technology”

Before there were computers, there were textbooks. Before there was presentation software, there were black and white boards. Before there were word processors, there were notebooks and pens. Before there was print, there was writing. Before there was writing, there was speech. And don’t forget about purposeful images. If teaching involves a passing along of knowledge, skill, etc. in a process that is not simply nor merely mimetic, but involves some sort of abstraction, then teaching involves technology.

2. “Teaching with technology” is redundant

The usefulness of the phrase has less to do with its brute truthfulness than it does with how it informs us in another manner, how it draws our attention to what we have been doing and how we have been previously informed or disciplined. In short, we have always taught with technology, even before we were aware of doing so. Our use of such technologies was mimetic (based on having seen others doing something similar), done without an abstract knowledge of what we were doing. Thus “teaching with technology” abstracts our practices so that we might know them.

3. We never teach “with” technology

Following from the claims above, we must understand that technology is never something that is simply “with” us, in two senses. First, and most simply, if teaching always involves some form of technology (from language to the Internet), then we cannot use “with.” Such would be the equivalent of “I eat with my mouth” or “I see with my eyes.” Without a mouth, I don’t eat. Without eyes, I don’t see. (Or at least not in the ways I am used to). Second, technology is not simply “with” us. That is, technology is neither transparent nor neutral. Technology adds to (or disposes of) teaching in unexpected ways, often in ways that do not conform to our desires or our expectations. Thus technology is not “with” us. That’s not to say that it is “against” us, but rather to say that whatever its allegiances seem to be at any given moment, they have, in fact, no concern for us whatsoever.

4. We need to think harder about what we mean by “technology”

We focus on computers, networks, and course management software. We think about presentation software and, maybe, clickers. We do not think hard enough about (text)books, pens, spiral-bound notebooks, backboards, our language as language, etc. No doubt there is a vast body of research on these matters, but seminars, conferences, and informal discussions on “teaching with technology” tend to focus on digital technologies. There are other technologies at work in the classroom (and outside of the classroom, where a great deal of what comprises teaching in the classroom gets done in terms of prep). Because these technologies are not neutral, because they operate in the classroom in unexpected and sometimes uncontrollable ways, we need to see that, when it comes to teaching, it’s technology all the way down; we need to think about what various layers of technology do and afford.

5. Interdisciplinarity should consist, in part, in recognizing discipline-specific technologies

There are technologies in engineering classrooms and physics laboratories that do not, at present, translate into literature courses or business seminars as technology. “Teaching with technology” effaces such difference in the name of interdisciplinarity, an interdiscipinarity that then only operates at one level of abstraction: the level on which these disciplines already meet (we all use Twitter, or Facebook, or Powerpoint, or clickers, or Blackboard cum DesireToLearn, etc.). What happens when Powerpoint meets the Bunsen burner? When Word meets a wind tunnel? Certain disciplines (cultural studies, philosophy) might be able to make sense of these meetings as objects of inquiry, but such making sense is not interdisciplinarity, but meta-disciplinarity.

6. Technology should be attached to a problem, which it tries to solves

We must resist using technology for its own sake. A wiki does not add to teaching outside of any other context, nor does a blog, Twitter, a textbook, or a pencil. A textbook provides a standardized means of disseminating information (whether it accomplishes this task is another question). A pencil provides a means of “remembering” information as well as providing a means of editing such “memories.” Each technology solves (or tries to solve) a problem, even if it introduces other problems (textbooks go out of date or limit the flexibility of a syllabus; pencils can distract from listening and notes can provide a false sense of security). Teaching with any technology must include a consideration of intended/desired outcomes: what will this specific technology do in this class under these conditions? Is there a problem here? What technology might solve that problem? How?

7. Technology is more than the latest, shiniest thing

We cannot fetishize technology as an end. We should not seek technology for its own sake. We should not listen to vendors of technology explain to us what we might do with their shiny things. We should ask ourselves what we need to do and then think of what we need to accomplish our self-set task. Because technology is not neutral and because it affords some things and not others, giving technology primacy likewise gives primacy to those things that technologies affords rather than to those things that we might desire in its absence. Homer: “The blade itself incites to violence.” The promise of technology all too often becomes bound up in the promise of the commodity: “Buy this software for whiter whites!” “Use this blogging platform and everyone will love you!” “Tweet your troubles away!” Our whites might be fine, we may be loved already, and our troubles might, it turns out, come from the new thing rather than being solve by it.

8. We must not simply instrumentalize technology

We should think about what problems technology might solve, and how, and avoid using technology for its own sake (and thus use it for our own sakes). At the same time, we must also understand the previous theses, and never forget that technology will not solve any problem without creating new ones, or that it might solve a problem in unexpected ways, or fail to solve a problem altogether. Technology should not become an end in itself, but nor should we think therefore that it can ever simply be a means to an otherwise neutral end. The introduction of any new technology to the classroom reorganizes “means” & “ends,” “subjects” & “objects.” The question of who (or what) is in control is complex, but we must never assume that the answer is simply “the professor” or some such.

9. There should be no single theory of “teaching with technology”

Technology cuts across many spaces: in-class/outside-of-class; personal space within class (the laptop screen)/public space outside of the classroom (the laptop screen at the coffee shop). Technology reconfigures memory. Technology is a (non-neutral) product and a (non-neutral) means of production. Technolgies overlap and interpenetrate one another (writing in textbooks and online) but cannot be reduced to one another (a television program on Hulu is not the same as the one on NBC). There is no single thing “technology” that is utterly coherent in all contexts, for all individuals. As such, we should not look for any single answer or even single set of answers to the question of “teaching with technology.”

Tools for thought

I wrote much of the above in the wake of (or under the influence of) the following theoretical texts (and, doubtless, others I fail to recall here).

  • Agamben, Giorgio. “What is an Apparatus?” An apparatus is not simply that device over there, but the things we say about it, the institutions and individuals who use it, the economies that spring up around it, etc.
  • Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works. The “informationalization” of the university (and the concomitant casualization of its workforce) has detrimental effects on teaching, research, and society.
  • Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on Control Societies.” While discipline still exists, it has been supplemented if not succeeded by control: the control of the individual through technologies specific to that individual (rather than general to the masses).
  • Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. How does power interact with bodies? How do we become disciplined?
  • —. “The Subject and Power.” There are not subjects without power and there is no power without subjectivity.
  • —. “What is Enlightenment?” Reads Kant’s answer to this question as a new moment in history. Historical progress is no longer the culmination of some series of events, but an escape from the past. We escape from one power to another.
  • Flusser, Vilém. Does Writing Have a Future? In a word: no.
  • —. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Human history as a history of its means of abstracting the world through images, writing, and other technologies.
  • Golumbia, David. The Cultural Logic of Computation. “Computationalism” (the equation of any number of things with computers) has detrimental effects on thought, society, etc.
  • Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” Enlightenment is the free public use of reason.
  • McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. What we call the human begins with the Gutenberg technology and the subsequent shift in sense ratios away from hearing what surrounds us and towards seeing what is before us (from our particular points of view).
  • —. Laws of Media: The New Science. All media (by which MM means “thing”) can be understood according to the the following laws: enhance (What does the medium make possible or improve? Search engines enhance our capacities for research.); reverse (How does the medium contradict its own effects when pushed to its limit? Search engines provide so many results that we are lost in the data stream.); retrieve (What older behavior does the new medium bring back into practice? The search engine makes plagiarism easier and perhaps more prevalent.); obsolesce (What older medium is pushed aside by the new medium? The card catalog is no longer useful.)
  • —. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Shifts in media environments involves shifts in sense ratios (the primacy afforded one or more senses over others). We must understand such shifts in order to recognize how different individuals learn differently (via the eye, the ear, etc.).
  • Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Human memory is more and more frequently embodied in technology. This “grammatization” (the breaking of language or being into smaller and smaller parts) must be thought in terms of a political economy different than that of Marx and the nineteenth century.
  • —. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. New technologies destroy our capacities for attention and contemplation. This issue must be thought in terms of a general organology that considers 1) human organs (the body and its parts); 2) technical organs (devices; think of organ in terms of “organon”); and 3) social organizations.
  • —. Technics and Time, Volume I: The Fault of Epithemeus: How can we think technology and its evolution outside of humanist concerns and parameters?
  • Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media. Media do not operate on human time scales and are therefore deeply inhuman.

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The Political Economy of Digital Media and Education

Posted in Uncategorized on 31 October 2011 by Ben

Here is my proposal (late damnit! I was thinking “Monday! Monday!” because of the end of the month, when it was due Sunday. Ah well, we will see) for Duke’s Marxism and New Media Conference in January.

Benjamin J Robertson

The Political Economy of Digital Media and Education

Proposal for MARXISM AND NEW MEDIA

In For a New Critique of Political Economy, Stiegler summarizes his previous arguments about memory and technics: “all technical objects constitute an intergenerational support of memory which, as material culture, overdetermines learning and mnesic activities. [. . .] A child arrives into a world in which tertiary retention [memory stored in technical objects] both precedes and awaits it, and which, precisely constitutes its world as world.” That this discussion begins Stiegler’s short text on political economy comes as no surprise; much of the first volume of Technics and Time considers the articulation of technics with economics: “there is no work without technics, no economic theory that is not a theory of work, of surplus profit, of means of production and investment.”

Recently at the group blog New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, John Protevi critiqued a series of posts on the “job market” in philosophy:

I don’t want to criticize the content of the posts; as far as I can tell, the advice has been excellent. But I do want to suggest that we change our frame of reference on these matters, and specify that we have been discussing only a small segment of the complete system of employment for philosophy instruction in institutions of higher education. So I’d like to suggest we call the analysis of the complete system “the political economy of philosophy instruction.”

However specific philosophy instruction and its political economy, Protevi’s new frame of reference provides a means by which to understand the impact of the recent focus on digital media, electronic literature, “digital humanities”, etc. within the narrow confines of English departments as well as in the broader dimensions of various initiatives, schools, professional organizations, and institutions.

Strangely, however “left” and/or free thinking the individuals in such contexts understand themselves to be, and whatever the promises they make for the technical objects they produce and study, far too often (always?), digital media fail to transform academic environments. When the student arrives, she finds waiting for her a world constituted already as a particular world, one in which institutional memories—practices of reading and writing, strategies of argument, limitations of thought—await her. As such, even with the steady increase in job opportunities for anyone working on “the digital”, the political economy of digital media education reduces such opportunities to an outdated system of academic labor. Whatever the promise of the digital humanities for a new way of thinking and doing, it would be quite easy to reverse engineer a human(ist) from a laptop.

When new media can only produce old media—i.e. when the laptop must produce the book, when the word processor must produce the essay—we must reconsider the articulation of old with new. This paper, through a consideration of Stiegler’s political economy, traces the residual and seemingly insurmountable humanism of digital media. Digital media retain many of the limitations of previous technical objects and thus constitute an institutional tertiary retention, one that constrains academic labor.

 

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Spring 2012 Course: Fanatsy after Tolkien

Posted in Teaching on 10 October 2011 by Ben

A lot of people who do 20th century lit, the posthuman, media studies, etc seem to have started their path to lifelong readerdom as SF aficionados. Not I. My first love was fantasy, although I now understand that my reading of fantasy was largely restricted to Tolkien clones. Seriously, I can recall one trilogy (fantasy is almost ALWAYS written in trilogies since Tolkien, even the heterodox stuff) that was nearly the same EXACT story complete with little people, a kraken guarding and long abandoned mine, and numerous other similarities so similar I can’t believe that there wasn’t a lawsuit. Wish I could remember the name of it. Likely buried in my parents basement along with Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, and my complete Narnia collection.

In any case, it’s only been recently that I have returned to fantasy (thank you Richard Morgan for The Steel Remains!) and have been asking myself whether there is something there beyond a tenuous connection to Rabelais, Beowulf, the classical epic, etc. Hence this class.

Like the baseball class, I am somewhat nervous about this one. With baseball, that nervousness derives from the fact that I have thought SO MUCH about the topic without actually conversing about that thought with anyone but myself. The nervousness here derives from the fact that I have not done a tremendous amount of thinking about the topic, was not even aware that there was thinking about the subject to be done until recently. As such, I am only dimly aware of the themes that we need to explore in the class. I am confident that 1) these themes will clarify themselves as time goes on (I am giving myself a crash course in the fantasy I don’t know very well right now: Howard, Leiber, Moorcock, Anderson and a bit of Lovecraft for this purpose); and 2) that this immediate non-knowledge will be a feature and not a bug–classes seem to go better for me when they becoming a process of discovery with students rather than a redistribution of knowledge that flows from me to them. We’ll see. In any case, I am excited to be thinking about this stuff and for the possibilities it opens for rethinking the 20th century.

Oh, and I have to say it: next term is very boy heavy, between this and baseball. Baseball seems a given, and fantasy it turns out is not much better in this respect. There are other women who could be included here beyond Clarke, but the two with which I am most familiar (Susan Cooper and Anne McCaffrey) are not appropriate I think (the reading level of each is not right for the class, and McCaffrey strays too much towards SF). I am sure that there are others I am missing, and regret that. I also regret that race is not more of an issue for the class, although Delaney touches on it (and the question of sexuality). I think that this shortcoming has to do with the genre and its intended audience (I recently read that the “hottest” woman in the history of D&D is the one who is willing to play a role-playing game with boys). However, I am also aware that I could use to learn more about the alt-history of fantasy. I am sure its out there.

ENGL 3060-009 & -010: Modern and Contemporary Literature

Fantasy after Tolkien

 

Fantasy literature offers something of a contradiction. On one hand, it is a thoroughly contemporary genre. Yes, the fantastic has a longer history than that provided by the twentieth century, but it was the twentieth century that gave the world fantastic as fantasy, magic that no one believed in, monsters that only existed in the imagination. However, on the other hand, fantasy implicitly and explicitly continues to allude to moments in the past when our understandings of the world were not quite set by science and rationality. The conflict endemic to a great deal of fantasy literature is that of modernity: the passing away of the supernatural and its replacement by the mundane. Think of Tolkein’s elves leaving Middle Earth or Lewis’ children who grow up and can no longer find Narnia.

 

Considered in this context, fantasy literature offers up a number of avenues of investigation. What happens to the fantastic in the face of the rational? Why is the fantastic so often portrayed according to the tropes of realism? How do various representations of the fantastic allow us to rethink the history of modernity in the United States and the West? This class will read fantasy literature produced in the wake of and against Tolkien as an evolving set of genre conventions and as a literature committed to experimental considerations of nature and history.

 

Evaluation will be based on quizzes, class presentations, response papers, and a final essay.

 

Reading List

Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

Samuel R. Delaney: Tales of Neveryon

Stephen R. Donaldson: Lord Foul’s Bane

Neil Gaiman: American Gods

Felix Gilman: The Half-Made World

Robert E. Howard: “The Phoenix on the Sword”

Fritz Leiber: “Ill Met in Lankhmar”

George RR Martin: A Game of Thrones

China Miéville: Perdido Street Station

Michael Moorcock: Elric: Stealer of Souls

JRR Tolkien: The Return of the King

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