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.

Stiegler and anamnesis

Stiegler raises the subject of anamnesis in Technics and Time Volume I, where at first introduction it refers to much what Plato meant by it in the Meno: the true knowledge possessed by the soul prior to birth that is recalled during life. In the Meno, Socrates leads an apparently uneducated slave through a complex geometrical problem without giving him any instruction, thus proving that the slave must have already possessed knowledge of geometry. My initial response to Golumbia’s provocative question about the end of digital literary studies had to do with this understanding of anamnesis and the danger I see in work that treats the digital as always already there. I see this danger in ill-conceived uses of media archaeological or similar approaches that seek to demonstrate the digital nature of moments prior to the digital. Just as nature became a book after the Gutenberg technology, it has now become a computer and, it turns out, it has always been a computer; we are only just now recollecting that knowledge at the prodding of latter-day Socrateses. Some of the more radical claims about the effects of computers on the world come out of such work. Siegfried Zielinski discusses such claims, which came with the “inflation” of the number of definitions of “media” in the 1990s, as follows: “Media and future became synonymous. If you didn’t engage with what was then baptized media, you were definitely passé.” Such assumptions became more entrenched with the addition of “digital” to “media,” or to anything really. He writes: “The digital became analogous to the alchemists’ formula for gold, and it was endowed with infinite powers of transformation” (32). In any case, given that Golumbia’s own work as well as that of others has already dismantled such thought, and given a provocative blog post by John Protevi to which I will turn later, I found my thoughts turning instead to Stiegler’s reformulation of anamnesis.

In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (another awkward title as it were), Stiegler argues that the major (to which is opposed the minor in terms of legal standing or social position with regard to maturity; eg someone not yet 18), must care for youth by fostering in it long circuits of attention that can withstand the force of short-circuiting technologies (such as those we refer to when we say “new media”). (To jump ahead, I am sympathetic with Stiegler on this issue insofar as I adhere to inherited practices of meaning-making, but nonetheless cannot completely agree with his position because it seems to install those practices in a position of superiority to all possible new practices. Of course, Stiegler will always claim to be working pharmacologically with regard to all techniques and technologies, but he seems rather conservative to me in this respect.) In any case, anamnesis, in Taking Care, becomes associated with the literacy Kant discusses in his essay on Enlightenment. Notably, Stiegler will take Foucault to task for failing to address this aspect of Kant in his myriad discussions of that essay. For Stiegler, anamnesis becomes the proper mode of individuation for youth. He writes:

The true, the just, and beautiful have an effect on me, transcending my understanding as such: they transform me. This intrinsic transcendence of the understanding by its object is what requires the individuation of “the one who knows” by what he knows (its object), where the knower is transformed even as the object being constructed is transformed in return. Plato calls this individuation “anamnesis.” (110, original emphasis)

My issue with Stiegler at this point has less to do with the residue in “anamnesis” of its previous formulation, in which it referred to the true and eternal knowledge of the soul, than with the manner in which he now aligns anamnesis with what he calls long circuits and the establishment and maintenance of these long circuits within literacy as discussed by Kant. More specifically, my issue with Stiegler derives from his insistence on long circuits, which is to say older psychotechniques such as reading and writing (and by extension what we might call scholarship) as the proper and only effective answers to the short circuits and short-circuiting tendencies of the psychotechnologies of digital media.

But that is a critique for another day, as here I want to think about anamnesis in terms of the institutional memory of academia. In Taking Care Stiegler neatly sums up academic training as part of a general organology. “A scholarly education, as the interiorization of organology, consists entirely of psychotechniques for capturing and fashioning attention, transforming it into nootechniques through the interiorization of disciplinary criteria” (65). By “organology” Stiegler refers to a general practice and study of the connection between human organs (ie the body and mind, broadly), technical organs (that is, technologies), and human organizations (such as schools). “Psychotechniques” are practices of individuation that cultivate attention (such as the book), as Alex Galloway glosses, and are distinguished from “psychotechnologies” which short circuit attention. “Nootechniques” are practices of transindivuation having to do with a “we” rather than an “I”; hence the connection here to “disciplinary criteria”, the standards of a group. Stiegler continues this passage as follows:

Embedded in these criteria are the rules governing the practice of any organology—such as the rules for rewriting in mathematics, as the anamnesis of the long circuits grounding those rules in reason (that is, by going back to axioms) transferred through the course work assigned by teachers in training programs. Certain organs—the eye, the hand, the brain—must be coordinated for reading and writing to take place, but the entire body must first be trained to sit for long periods of time. (65)

We can see the connection here between Stiegler’s organology and academic training in the humanities. We learn to sit and read, to sit and write. Our human organs become coordinated with technical organs, namely those having to do with reading and writing—not only books but furniture. We learn that perhaps the most valuable thing we can own is a good office chair that will prevent chronic back pain. Moreover, this coordination of human organ and technical organ, of person, book, chair, etc. also coordinates with an organization, namely the school (or, as Stiegler prefers, the skolieon). And, again to jump ahead, we see in this complex coordination the instantiation of a discipline but also of a tertierary retention. Stored in the literacy practices of the humanities are not only certain contents—novels, our thoughts on novels, etc. Also stored there is human gesture, a time of reading and writing, in the same manner that the assembly line stores the gesture of the industrial worker that preceded it. It is here that I become concerned with DH and its technologies and it is here that we can turn to the political economy of academic instruction, production, and employment.

Evaluating digital scholarship

I will return to Stiegler in a moment, but first I want to briefly turn my attention to the recent special section of Profession on evaluating digital scholarship as an example of the discourse on this political economy. Before I say anything that appears to be negative about the section, first let me express how impressive it is, and how valuable it is as a contribution to the development of the profession. Any “issues” I have with these essays are bound up in a problem I find in Stiegler: a fundamental inability, which belongs I think to all of us, to conceive of a present that does not rely in some way on the past. In the context of the special section, the problem becomes thinking of what is not-scholarship (that is, not what tries and yet fails to be scholarship but what is not-scholarship insofar as it is something else) in a positive manner, where “positive” means both “good” and “extant.” What is not-scholarship, which I am here aligning with what Stiegler critiques as short-circuiting psychotechnologies even if the contributors to Profession are not, can only be thought insofar as it is reduced to scholarship or meaning, which is to say negatively, in terms of what it refuses to be or return us to.

After all, when we speak of “evaluating” digital work, we speak of finding its value, we speak of situating it in a political economy which by necessity extends into the past. Where else might we ground such formulations of value? This issue is not one of nominalism, of what we call this new work or practice, but rather of the establishment or destruction (that is short-circuiting) of a connection of the present to the past and hence the future. Stiegler’s long circuits always loop back into the past, back into literacy and into reading and writing in terms that Kant established for the Enlightenment. We write for a literate public, for a public that can read our writing (or we ought to). We “care” for youth and the relationships among generations by establishing and maintaining programming institutions capable of “long-circuiting.” (And, as an aside, while I am in many ways sympathetic to Stiegler’s overall idea here, there remains in it a creepy paternalism redolent of one of Plato’s more odious ideas: the philosopher king.) What happens when we stop reading or writing, when we stop producing things that can be understood according to the values established by reading and writing?

I sense in some of these essays a certain hesitation. I do not mean a faltering, nor do I mean a hesitation born of some sort of nervousness. Rather, I mean something closer to what Todorov articulates with regard to the fantastic. Todorov characterizes the fantastic as a genre by the hesitation it produces in its readers. This hesitation is a reader’s inability reader to finally decide the ontology of the (apparent) ghost or other (alleged) supernatural being or event present in the text. If, in the end, the ghost was not a ghost but has a rational and natural explanation, the reader finds herself in the context of the uncanny, in which natural things appear to be something beyond what they are. If, by contrast, the ghost is truly a ghost, we find ourselves in the context of the marvelous, which admits to a supernatural dimension to or beyond everyday experience.

The hesitation in the present context works as follows. On one hand we find an insistence that digital scholarship not be shoehorned into print culture—that it not be reduced to the uncanny, that it not become the same old thing dressed up in an unexpected or otherwise strange manner. Against this tendency, for example, Schreibman, Mandell, and Olsen write in their introduction to the special section: “Current debates in the field of of the digital humanities about the divergent practices of ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading are really a screen for deeper changes called for by the advent of new media. Digital technologies do more than propose new ways of thinking, as did theory; they require new modes of being” (126, my emphasis). Against the uncanny, they posit the marvelous.

On the other hand, we find an inability to think or enact this mode of being beyond the constraints of the terms that precede and, of course, in-form our thoughts of it. Here we find a tendency against the marvelous that leads us back to the uncanny, as if to say that we can obey no laws, no criteria, but those which we already have, those with which we are comfortable and familiar. For example, earlier in their introduction, Schreibman, Mandell, and Olsen write: “digital scholarship needs to be recognized not only as scholarship but also as literary scholarship” (125). This injunction comes in the context of their argument against claims that digital work that involves long-neglected practices of bibliography, editing, and philology is merely service. I agree with them 100% on this issue. At the same time, and I doubt that there is anyone here who would not fall into similar language, they cannot avoid the fundamental category or form of “scholarship,” the insertion of the digital into pre-established and ongoing long circuits according to which knowledge practices have been, are, and likely will continue to be evaluated and valorized. The book, in a world that recognizes digital work as literary scholarship, might no longer be the privileged form of scholarship when it comes to T&P decisions, but scholarship and its long circuits, which come from a culture fully in-formed by the book, will remain.

Again, my aim here is not to undermine or disparage this work, which is outstanding. For example, I think that Bethany Nowviskie’s essay on collaborative writing is excellent and demonstrates and overcomes, perhaps indirectly, the fears academics have about losing the individual nature of their work. In addition to these essays, I would also recommend Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s recent book Planned Obsolescence and Michael Gold’s Debates in the Digital Humanities as entry points into this debate. In any case, again, my critique, such that it is, is a soft one. The issue here remains that we might wish for the new, might even seek to identify, think, or build it. However, we hesitate at its threshold or, perhaps more correctly, we hesitate between the new and the old and thus render the digital as the fantastic, tending towards the marvelous but always burdened by the uncanny. Perhaps it is right that we do so, and I admit that this hesitation comforts me. However, I must admit that even as I remain convinced that we need to take Stiegler’s concerns about long and short circuits seriously, I believe we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we decided on the uncanny once and for all as he seems to suggest we do. In this respect, I find the hesitation in Schreibman, Mandell, and Olsen described above preferable and more productive than Stiegler’s subordination of hypomnesis (or technical memory) to anamnesis and his privileging of older and more familiar hypomnemata to those newer and therefore still in flux.

The political economy of academic instruction, production, and employment

If Stiegler’s anamnesis provided the first inspiration for this paper, John Protevi’s call, in the context of his discipline of philosophy, for a move away from a discourse of the “job market” that assumes that one enters such a market in the late stages of or even after the PhD and towards what he calls a discussion of “the political economy of philosophy instruction” provides the second. Protevi argues that philosophers need to change their frame of reference and stop referring to “the job market” as something that happens either late in the PhD or afterwards. I would suggest, in this context, we think along similar lines and therefore discuss the political economy of academic instruction and production, or something similar.

One’s interaction with this political economy begins well before one is ABD. A successful run at the market has its roots perhaps as far back as high school and the process of undergraduate admissions. If this suggestion seems hyberbolic, I hope we can agree that success at the undergraduate level, and thus admission to a top-ranked PhD program, certainly helps with the job hunt that waits for a prospective academic in the future. Current discussions about how to advise undergraduates about going (or, more often, not going) into a PhD program in the humanities demonstrate that the market does not begin during graduate school. In fact, it might end during graduate school. As Marc Bousquet convincingly argues, for many PhD candidates, the best (or perhaps only) academic job they will ever have will have been the one they had during graduate school. In Bousquet’s argument, PhDs are not the product of a system of instruction that feeds a demand for intellectual labor, but the by-product of a systemic demand for cheap and relatively uneducated instructors. That is, it is the PhD student and her cheap labor, not the finished PhD and her more expensive labor, that the system demands. Once the PhD is over, the student has priced herself right out of the profession (insofar as the profession has become more comprised of term-based, non-tenure-track, and casualaized labor). As such any discussion or analysis of a well-defined and discrete job market does us a disservice. Moreover, anyone who thinks that the system is broken also does us a disservice. I am reminded of Galloway and Thacker’s argument that epidemics are not the result of networks that fail, but of networks that work all too well. The crisis in academic employment is not that of a system that has failed, but the stabilization of a system that operates exactly as it is meant to operate.

It seems to me no coincidence that what Bousquet calls “informationalism” and Golumbia calls “computationalism” rise in prominence at roughly the same time, from the 1950s onward, but really taking root in the 1960s before coming to fruition in the 80s. I am oversimplifying in the extreme, and I don’t want to push on this point too hard here or suggest a causal relationship between these things. I do not think computers, or the forms of thought they engender, are to blame for our job crisis, but I do want to think about the increased emphasis, from HASTAC and elsewhere, on getting PhD students involved in projects under the umbrella of Digital Humanities and what this emphasis means. The stories I have heard about how graduate school worked decades ago suggest that one did not need to attend conferences or to publish as a PhD student. Now, one had better present at several conferences and probably ought to publish one article before “going on the marker”. We still decry this professionalization even as we increasingly ask students to network through Facebook and Twitter, take part in the development of digital tools and resources, etc. Often, it seems to me, these digital projects have less to do with the scholarship of a given PhD student

And even as we consider the relation of DH or new media to that side of academic employment we should recognize another thing that the special section of Profession I just discussed makes clear, namely that the political economy of academic employment does not end once one has a job. One must produce and produce in a recognizable manner; one must produce scholarship, one must research. Of course, this research, or its program (and there is that word again) will have begun for most if not all scholars in graduate school. To get a job, one must go to the right place to study the right thing; to keep a job, one must continue to study that thing and demonstrate that study through scholarship. But for those students who work in the as yet non-traditional forms of scholarship made possible by new media and DH’s emphasis on it, it will no longer be “simply” a case of going to the right school to study the right thing and subsequently producing scholarship that follows from this study (as if that were simple). One will have to, for the near if not foreseeable future, justify what one does as scholarship if what one does is in part determined by or involved with new media.

To be clear: current graduate students increasingly devote time to digital projects. These projects include theses in media studies (which remain the most familiar form of digital work); work developing and using databases, etc.; professional and semi-professional blogging activities (such as the work undertaken by HASTAC scholars); the production of digital editions; etc. Some of them, no doubt, engage in this work because it promises jobs. Few of them, I imagine, understand as yet the fact that getting these jobs will only be a first step in a longer process of justifying their work.

As an aside, we should also think in terms of this political economy in broader terms than I am even suggesting here, as I am not accounting much for teaching and those colleges and universities that privilege it over research. Moreover, discussion of this political economy should include analysis of increasing demands for and emphasis on alt-ac jobs, which seem to involve placing people trained as scholars into staff jobs where they make decisions rather than contemplate the consequences of those positions in the manner that scholars might. I realize that I am uninformed on the alt-ac debate in all of its dimensions, but it holds for me many problems. These include the aforementioned “deskilling” or proletarianization of the PhD who now must give up scholarship for management; the increasing requirement that one have a PhD to do what was likely once a job that required a bachelor’s or master’s degree; and trickle down effect that this last issue has on employment more broadly. In fact, as Protevi argues, I believe that when we discuss the political economy I am naming here we must think it in relation to other sectors of the broader economy.

To head towards a conclusion, I want to throw one idea out there. 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.” Beyond all of the specific projects and types of projects new media offers to scholars in the humanities, I think we need to think through the tertiary retentions it engenders. Stiegler argues that we need better understanding of technics because technics informs so much of what we do. Zielinski tells us that media is deeply inhuman and discusses its deep time. I wonder what we are creating when we work in new media. I do not wonder about our writing or our editions, but how we are transforming our individual and collective being. I realize that this question is not new, but I nonetheless raise it here in order to highlight the fact that by working in new media now, we are setting up for the future an intergenerational support of memory that we do not understand. Again, I am uncomfortable with what I see in Stiegler as a sort of paternalism. I am likewise uncomfortable with the insistence by some pundits that we should discourage undergraduates from entering the profession. “Taking care” often seems to involve a “knowing better” that does not allow for self-discovery in the traditional sense. Nonetheless, I understand the impulse to care and cannot in the end discredit it.

In any case, I think we can see here how Stiegler is useful for thinking through political economy in the context of technics. After all, if one returns to Technics and Time, one can see that economy ha slong been one of his concerns. He writes there: “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.”

With this in mind I want to make several suggestions:

• that we continue to consider how new media operate in the political economy of academic employment and education much the way the contributors to Professionalready have
  • however, we should extend this consideration to account for graduate training and research projects
  • we might consider this question in terms of graduate funding (should we be providing them with technology and the space in which to use it effectively?), in terms of graduate teaching (especially in the context of the writing lab, a space with which many tenured profs continue to be unfamiliar but has become a disciplinary requirement for many who teach or would teach first year writing), in terms of media as object, in terms of media as tool, etc.
• further, we should think about new media as a tertiary retention of academic knowledge
  • I mean not only that we think about it in terms of the database that organizes our journals or our research objects
  • I mean, additionally, that we need to understand how new media stores the book, the logic of the book; that it does seems obvious, as new media was produced by a culture entirely conditioned by print (if we buy McLuhan’s argument); understanding new media as a tertiary retention of “book logic” (itself a redundant term) might be a first step in recognizing that the call to call digital work “scholarship” does not go nearly far enough in that it only returns new media to the logic that informed it but does not do enough to create the logic that it might inform
  • I mean, also, that we need to understand how new media and its attendant ergonomic supplements (the desk, the chair, the laptop stand, the KSM and now touchscreen interfaces) store the gestures, the embodiment as well as the mind the academic
  • we should understand as well how new media is a tertiary retention of academia in relation to its status of tertiary retention of other fields (especially that of business; again it seems to me no coincidence that the rise of digital work in the humanities coincides with the casualization of its workforce and what Bousquet calls the informationalization of the university, although this relationship remains murky to me)
• in short, we need to think of new media in the context of Stiegler’s organology

• still need to discuss, perhaps, Stiegler’s critique of Marx
  • namely, S says Marx fails to separate the working class from the proletariat
  • this is because the proletariat is something that happens to workers as they are deskilled, as their knowledge of work becomes tertiary retention (as what they did is automated)
  • however, I think that this is unfair to Marx, as at the time it was mainly the working class who were proletarianized, I think
  • with the advent of expert systems, of cybernetics and the information age, we get the proletarianization of management and the bourgeoisie
  • I think that this proletarianization happens later for the most part as a development of capitalism away from the industrial model and the bourgeoisie/proletariat split
  • the current split (which is newer) of hacker/vectoralist, we see the spread of proletarianization to the vectoralists
  • consider in this context Bousquet’s discussion of the Yeshiva decision and the fact that capitalism has learned to consolidate the classes to either redirect/redistribute class antagonisms or to do away with them altogether
  • as the proletariat become managers, so too do managers become proletairianized

make sure to address Stiegler’s failure to think of new weapons, a la Deleuze

need to discuss the manner in which digital technologies STORE academic knowledge in the manner that the assembly line stores industrial gestures (that we once human); this is the process of proletarianization for Stiegler; how does this relate to new media in the humanities?

that would account for workforce casualization issues that in part determine the nature of graduate instruction. Protevi’s vocabulary is both useful and instructive for those of us involved in the study and teaching of language, literature,and culture, and when we use it to address the issues to which I now turn, we can easily see the manner in which such a political economy not only begins for each of us well before we enter the market, but how it extends to the time after we have left it (if we ever do).

However, Stiegler, rather than dismissing anamnesis as what he might call “mystagogy,” instead excises from it its more Platonic valences and installs it in his thinking

Stiegler, whatever reservations I have about him as described above, offers us a way to think about this issue in terms of institutional memory. First, consider Stiegler’s description of scholarly education from Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, which I think is apt here:

In For a New Critique of Political Economy, Stiegler writes:

The process of grammatization is the technical history of memory, in which hypomneisc memory continually reintroduces the constitution of a tension within anamnesic memory. This anamnesic tension is exterieorized in the form of works of the mind [or of spirit, espirit], through which epochs of psychosocial individuation and disindividuation are pharmacologically configured.

I have far more to say on this issue, but I just want to suggest for now that we need to think about the above issues in terms of this political economy. To that end, we might think about new media technologies as what Stiegler calls tertiary retentions insofar as these technologies store not only our content but the logic that subtends it. Insofar as new media has become a tertiary retention of academia, it creates a deep time of academia, but one that is, I think, different than the deep time of the book and “scholarship.” How that deep time works and how it connects with other sectors of the economy—funding, long term employment rates, etc—not to mention the future, now becomes the question.

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.

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.

Stiegler’s Long Circuits

My first inspiration for this particular instantiation of my concern with the future and the futuristic came as I was reading Bernard Stiegler’s account of anamnesis in Technics and Time, Volume I. There Stiegler—who at this point is still setting the stage for his own contributions to technics by working through the work of others such as Bertrand Gille, Andrei Leroi-Gourhan, Gilbert Simondon, Plato, and Rousseau, all inflected by Heidegger—summarizes Plato on the acquisition of knowledge in terms of anamnesis, or the recollection of knowledge previously known to the immortal soul.

Plato’s two primary discussions of anamnesis come in the Meno and the Phaedo. In the latter, Socrates, in the last hours of his life before his execution, seeks to explain the immortality of the soul and hence his readiness to die at the hands of the Athenian government. There, unlike in Meno, Socrates explains anamnesis in terms of the eternal forms. For example, Socrates states: “Then before we began to see or otherwise perceive, we must have possessed knowledge of the Equal itself if we were about to refer our sense perceptions of equal objects to it, and realized that all of them were eager to be like it, but were inferior” (113). The eternal nature of the soul gives it, and subsequently us, access to other things of eternal nature.

Stiegler does not reference Phaedo, but instead spends his time considering what is probably Plato’s more radical formulation of anamnesis in the Meno. There, by way of a series of questions, Socrates guides a relatively uneducated slave through a geometrical problem and thus establishes, because Socrates has provided him with no instruction, that the slave had already possessed this knowledge. This discussion is more radical than that in the Phaedo, I think, because rather than dealing with the somewhat more limited domain of the forms, it instead establishes that the human always already possesses knowledge of reality and its underpinnings in a broad manner.

I had thought that I would not move very far past this discussion. I had thought to discuss the danger of thinking of the digital as part and parcel of a certain anamnesia, as a recollection of the true knowledge of the soul. I see this danger in ill-conceived uses of media archaeological or similar approaches that seek to demonstrate the digital nature of moments prior to the digital. Just as nature became a book after the Gutenberg technology, it has now become a computer and, it turns out, it has always been a computer; we are only just now recollecting that knowledge at the prodding of latter-day Socrateses. Some of the more radical claims about the effects of computers on the world come out of such work. Siegfried Zielinski discusses such claims, which came with the “inflation” of the number of definitions of “media” in the 1990s, as follows: “Media and future became synonymous. If you didn’t engage with what was then baptized media, you were definitely passé.” Such assumptions became more entrenched with the addition of “digital” to “media,” or to anything really. He writes: “The digital became analogous to the alchemists’ formula for gold, and it was endowed with infinite powers of transformation” (32). We can thus understand a paper with a title as obnoxious as “Digital Anamnesis” to be symptomatic of such alchemy.

In any case, I think further critique of such thought—already begun by, for example, David Golumbia in The Cultural Logic of Computation and by Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture—would be valuable. It would also dovetail nicely with Marc Bousquet’s critique of informationalism in the contemporary American university, especially in the present context of a discussion of knowledge practices in the humanities. However, when we place Stiegler’s account of anamnesis alongside these other texts, and when we consider the evolution of Stiegler’s thinking on anamnesis, we see this issue in a new light and can think of it in somewhat different terms. Those terms have less to do with rewriting the past according to present metaphors than with the need of the present moment to tie both itself and the future to the past in order to ground knowledge and its production in previously established norms. And before I go on, please note that I am not indicting historical approaches, or even media archaeology, but only their misuse as a sort of Whig history.

In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Stiegler engages with what he calls psychotecniques and psychotechnologies, each of which is responsible for in-forming young brains and minds through synaptogenesis, the creation of circuits in the mental apparatus. Stiegler will champion the long circuits engendered by psychotechniques (which involve books and reading, for example) against the short circuits and short-circuiting tendencies of psychotechnologies (which mainly involve new media). His concern is that new media and digital technologies destroy attention and thereby fail to create the long circuits through which connections between generations are established and care for the younger generations takes place. He blames this failure on what he calls “I-don’t-give-a-fuckism” (je-m’en-foutisme as translated by Alex Galloway; Stephen Barker acknowledges this vulgarity in his translation of Taking Care, but prefers “I-don’t-give-a-damnism”).

Psychotechnologies are developed and implemented by the programming industries. They involve, among other things, marketing, a villain that Stiegler draws from Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies.” Contra the programming industries stand programming institutions such as schools. Importantly, we need to hear in “programming” Stiegler’s term “grammatization” (adapted from Derrida), which refers to the processes by which human beings are broken down and encoded in and by writing and other technologies. Likewise, in “school” we need to hear “skholeion” (the term Stiegler tends to use) and its cognates “scholia,” “scholarship,” and “Scholastic.” Although I do not think that Stiegler intends to make such a connection, the resonance between his skholeion and Scholasticism is suggestive when we think of the Schoolmen and their defense of orthodoxy.

The school, and, I think, scholarship insofar as scholarship involves literacy, are for Stiegler perhaps the most significant part of an eroding system of care by which a mature majority tends to the education of an as yet immature minority (where “major” and “minor” refer to a legal standing based on age rather than numeric proportions). He notes, as he begins his discussion of schools, that the Lesser Hippias, likely Plato’s first written work, begins not with the question of being or knowing but with the question of teaching and thus with the question of care that Foucault will analyze in his late work on the techniques of the self. Steigler values how Foucault discusses these techniques as care. However, he critiques Foucault for having conceived of education only as discipline and not as care, as well as for failing to address how writing and literacy contribute to such care until his (Foucault’s) very last work—in short, for not taking his thought of these techniques far enough to present them in the positive manner that Stiegler wishes to establish.

As he moves towards this critique of Foucault, Stiegler presents a reformulation of anamnesis that moves away from his earlier summary of it as a true knowledge possessed by the soul in Technics and Time and towards an understanding of it as a technique of the self. Stiegler writes:

The true, the just, and beautiful have an effect on me, transcending my understanding as such: they transform me. This intrinsic transcendence of the understanding by its object is what requires the individuation of “the one who knows” by what he knows (its object), where the knower is transformed even as the object being constructed is transformed in return. Plato calls this individuation “anamnesis.” (110, original emphasis))

My issue with Stiegler at this point has less to do with the residue in “anamnesis” of its previous formulation, in which it referred to the true and eternal knowledge of the soul, than with the manner in which he now aligns anamnesis with what he calls long circuits and the establishment and maintenance of these long circuits within reading and writing as discussed by Kant in “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” More specifically, my issue with Stiegler derives from his insistence on long circuits, which is to say older psychotechniques such as reading and writing (what we might call scholarship) as the proper and only effective answers to the short circuits and short-circuiting tendencies of the psychotechnologies of digital media.

Foucault famously writes of Kant’s short text in several places. According to Stiegler, Foucault fails in his analysis of Kant to account for the special place in it of reading and writing. For Kant, argues Stiegler, Enlightenment involves the public use of reason, a use that must involve writing and reading. Stiegler makes this point clear in the following passage, in which he uses the term “maturity” to refer to the ideal if never achieved endpoint of the individuation of a person who is a minor into a person who is a “major”: “Foucault does not mention the perfectly technological nature of maturity defined as a mature consciousness that writes before a public of mature consciousness able to read those writings” (116, original emphasis).

By way of concluding with this discussion Stiegler, let us understand three things. First, Stiegler privileges writing as a psychotechnique that affords and engenders long circuits of attention. This psychotechnique grants one a relation to the past that is properly philosophical, which is to say it grants a process of individuation known as anamnesis. Second, Stiegler is well aware therefore of the connection between anamnesis and hypomnesis, the latter being memory beyond memory, memory stored in tertiary retentions. After all, writing is such a hypomnemata. He considers this connection at length in the context of his discussion of pharmaka. Third, Stiegler does not dismiss digital technologies out of hand, but rather argues that they should only be deployed in the wake of or as subtended by psychotechniqes capable of producing proper processes of individuation, capable of producing anamnesis.

Additionally, I wish to note at this point my divergent feelings I have about Stiegler’s argument. I am sympathetic to it, on one hand. I see I-don’t-give-a-fuckism everywhere in contemporary culture, and I find his agenda of establishing care through long circuits that account for historical forms and practices compelling in this context, as so much of this I-don’t-give-a-fuckism seems to derive from individual or collective inability or unwillingness to understand present concerns in relation to anything but present concerns. As Stiegler would note, in such presentist thought desires are reduced to drives. By contrast, however, I wonder if Stiegler’s long circuits, which must always loop through the past, hold back another long circuit that might start with the present, with what is new now, and thus establish new knowledge practices that are appropriate for this moment rather than being dependent on one previous. Of course such a leap presents to us any number of difficulties, difficulties that we, on this side of the singularity, have no capacity to judge.

Evaluating digital scholarship

Before I say anything that appears to be negative about the section of the most recent issue of Profession on evaluating digital scholarship, first let me express how impressive it is, and how valuable it is as a contribution to the development of the profession. Any “issues” I have with these essays are bound up in the problem I described above, and that I find in Stiegler: a fundamental inability, which belongs I think to all of us, to conceive of a present that does not rely in some way on the past. In the context of the special section, the problem becomes thinking of what is not-scholarship (that is, not what tries and yet fails to be scholarship but what is not-scholarship insofar as it is something else) in a positive manner, where “positive” means both “good” and “extant.” What is not-scholarship, which I am here aligning with short-circuiting psychotechnologies even if the contributors to Profession are not, can only be thought insofar as it returns us to scholarship or meaning, which is to say negatively, in terms of what it refuses to be or return us to.

After all, when we speak of “evaluating” digital work, we speak of finding its value, we speak of situating it in a political economy which by necessity extends into the past. Where else might we ground such formulations of value? This issue is not one of nominalism, of what we call this new work or practice, but rather of the establishment or destruction (that is short-circuiting) of a connection of the present to the past and hence the future. Stiegler’s long circuits always loop back into the past, back into literacy and into reading and writing in terms that Kant established for the Enlightenment. We write for a literate public, for a public that can read our writing (or we ought to). We “care” for youth and the relationships among generations by establishing and maintaining programming institutions capable of “long-circuiting.” (And, as an aside, while I am in many ways sympathetic to Stiegler’s overall idea here, there remains in it a creepy paternalism redolent of one of Plato’s more odious ideas: the philosopher king.) What happens when we stop reading or writing, when we stop producing things that can be understood according to the values established by reading and writing?

I sense in some of these essays a certain hesitation. I do not mean a faltering, nor do I mean a hesitation born of some sort of nervousness. Rather, I mean something closer to what Todorov articulates with regard to the fantastic. Todorov characterizes the fantastic as a genre by the hesitation it produces in its readers. This hesitation is a reader’s inability reader to finally decide the ontology of the (apparent) ghost or other (alleged) supernatural being or event present in the text. If, in the end, the ghost was not a ghost but has a rational and natural explanation, the reader finds herself in the context of the uncanny, in which natural things appear to be something beyond what they are. If, by contrast, the ghost is truly a ghost, we find ourselves in the context of the marvelous, which admits to a supernatural dimension to or beyond everyday experience.

The hesitation in the present context works as follows. On one hand we find an insistence that digital scholarship not be shoehorned into print culture—that it not be reduced to the uncanny, that it not become the same old thing dressed up in an unexpected or otherwise strange manner. Against this tendency, for example, Schreibman, Mandell, and Olsen write in their introduction to the special section: “Current debates in the field of of the digital humanities about the divergent practices of ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading are really a screen for deeper changes called for by the advent of new media. Digital technologies do more than propose new ways of thinking, as did theory; they require new modes of being” (126, my emphasis). Against the uncanny, they posit the marvelous.

On the other hand, we find an inability to think or enact this mode of being beyond the constraints of the terms that precede and, of course, in-form our thoughts of it. Here we find a tendency against the marvelous that leads us back to the uncanny, as if to say that we can obey no laws, no criteria, but those which we already have, those with which we are comfortable and familiar. For example, earlier in their introduction, Schreibman, Mandell, and Olsen write: “digital scholarship needs to be recognized not only as scholarship but also as literary scholarship” (125). This injunction comes in the context of their argument against claims that digital work that involves long-neglected practices of bibliography, editing, and philology is merely service. I agree with them 100% on this issue. At the same time, and I doubt that there is anyone here who would not fall into similar language, they cannot avoid the fundamental category or form of “scholarship,” the insertion of the digital into pre-established and ongoing long circuits according to which knowledge practices have been, are, and likely will continue to be evaluated and valorized. The book, in a world that recognizes digital work as literary scholarship, might no longer be the privileged form of scholarship when it comes to T&P decisions, but scholarship and its long circuits, which come from a culture fully in-formed by the book, will remain.

Again, my aim here is not to undermine or disparage this work. I would also add that the issue I have just identified can be found in other essays in this special section to varying degrees. The issue here remains that we might wish for the new, might even seek to identify, think, or build it. However, we hesitate at its threshold or, perhaps more correctly, we hesitate between the new and the old and thus render the digital as the fantastic, tending towards the marvelous but always burdened by the uncanny. Perhaps it is right that we do so, and I admit that this hesitation comforts me. However, I must admit that even as I remain convinced that we need to take Stiegler’s concerns about long and short circuits seriously, that I think we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we decided on the uncanny once and for all as he seems to suggest we do. In this respect, I find the hesitation in Schreibman, Mandell, and Olsen described above preferable and more productive than Stiegler’s subordination of hypomnesis to anamnesis and his privileging of older and more familiar hypomnemata to those newer and therefore still in flux.

The political economy of academic education and production

If Stiegler provided the first inspiration for this paper, John Protevi’s call, in the context of his discipline of philosophy, for a move away from a discourse of the “job market” that assumes that one enters such a market in the late stages of or even after the PhD and towards what he calls a discussion of “the political economy of philosophy instruction” provides the second. Protevi argument is that philosophers need to change their frame of reference and stop referring to “the job market” as something that happens either late in the PhD or afterwards. I would suggest, in this context, we think along similar lines and therefore discuss the political economy of academic instruction and production, or something similar.

I have far more to say on this issue, but I just want to suggest for now that we need to think about the above issues in terms of this political economy. To that end, we might think about new media technologies as what Stiegler calls tertiary retentions insofar as these technologies store not only our content but the logic that subtends it. Insofar as new media has become a tertiary retention of academia, it creates a deep time of academia, but one that is, I think, different than the deep time of the book and “scholarship.” How that deep time works and how it connects with other sectors of the economy—funding, long term employment rates, etc—not to mention the future, now becomes the question.

The political economy of academic employment begins well before one is ABD. A successful run at the market has its roots perhaps as far back as high school and the process of undergraduate admissions. If this suggestion seems hyberbolic, I hope we can agree that success at the undergraduate level, and thus admission to a top-ranked PhD program, certainly helps with the job market that waits for a prospective academic in the future. Current discussions about how to advise undergraduates about going (or, more often, not going) into a PhD program in the humanities demonstrate that the market does not begin during graduate school. In fact, it might end during graduate school. As Marc Bousquet convincingly argues, for many PhD candidates, the best (or perhaps only) academic job they will ever have will have been the one they had during graduate school. As such any discussion or analysis of a well-defined and discrete job market does us a disservice.

Furthermore, the special section of Profession I just discussed makes clear what we should already know: that the political economy of academic employment does not end once one has a job. One must produce and produce in a recognizable manner; one must produce scholarship, one must research. Of course, this research, or its program (and there is that word again) will have begun for most if not all scholars in graduate school. To get a job, one must go to the right place to study the right thing; to keep a job, one must continue to study that thing and demonstrate that that study through scholarship. And for this reason if no other, we cannot think of the the political economy of academic employment as such. That is, we might better think of what I have just referred to as the political economy of academic employment as “the political economy of academic instruction and production.”

As an aside, we should also think in terms of this political economy in broader terms than I am even suggesting here, as I am not accounting much for teaching and those colleges and universities that privilege it over research. Moreover, this political economy should include analysis of how academic education and production involves other sectors of the broader economy, as Protevi himself suggests.

To return to subject at hand, we can see that the special section of Profession offers to those in graduate school or even contemplating graduate school and thus contemplating (probably unknowingly) entering this political economy a proposition even further daunting than the difficulty of getting or keeping a job according to traditional criteria. Not only will one need to go to the right school to study the right thing and subsequently produce scholarship that follows from this study. One will have to, in the near if not foreseeable future, justify what one does as scholarship if what one does is in part determined by or involved with new media.

To be clear: current graduate students increasingly devote time to digital projects. These projects include theses in media studies (which remains the most familiar form of digital work); work developing and using databases, etc.; professional and semi-professional blogging activities (such as the work undertaken by HASTAC scholars); the production of digital editions; etc. Some of them, no doubt, engage in this work because it promises jobs. Few of them, I imagine, understand as yet the fact that getting these jobs will only be a first step in a longer process of justifying their work.

Stiegler, whatever reservations I have about him as described above, offers us a way to think about this issue in terms of institutional memory. First, consider Stiegler’s description of scholarly education from Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, which I think is apt here: “A scholarly education, as the interiorization of organology, consists entirely of psychotechniques for capturing and fashioning attention, transforming it into nootechniques through the interiorization of disciplinary criteria” (65). By “organology” Stiegler refers to a general practice and study of the connection between human organs (ie the body and mind, broadly), technical organs (that is, technologies), and human organizations (such as schools). “Psychotechniques” are practices of individuation that cultivate attention (such as the book), as Alex Galloway explains in his helpful glossary on Stiegler’s terms. “Nootechniques” are practices of transindivuation having to do with a “we” rather than an “I”; hence the connection here to “disciplinary criteria”, the standards of a group. Stiegler continues this passage as follows:

Embedded in these criteria are the rules governing the practice of any organology—such as the rules for rewriting in mathematics, as the anamnesis of the long circuits grounding those rules in reason (that is, by going back to axioms) transferred through the course work assigned by teachers in training programs. Certain organs—the eye, the hand, the brain—must be coordinated for reading and writing to take place, but the entire body must first be trained to sit for long periods of time. (65)

Furthermore, these human organs, which are here coordinated with technical organs (notably those having to do with reading and writing), must also be coordinated with human organizations. It is here that we must think further about the aforementioned discussion in the context of academic employment.

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.”

Again, I am uncomfortable with what I see in Stiegler as a sort of paternalism. I am likewise uncomfortable with the insistence by some pundits that we should discourage undergraduates from entering the profession. “Taking care” often seems to involve a “knowing better” that does not allow for self-discovery in the traditional sense. Nonetheless, I understand the impulse to care and cannot in the end discredit it.

In any case, 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.”

Thus I want to make several suggestions:

• that we continue to consider how new media operate in the political economy of academic employment and education much the way the contributors to Professionalready have
  • however, we should extend this consideration to account for graduate training and research projects
  • we might consider this question in terms of graduate funding (should we be providing them with technology and the space in which to use it effectively?), in terms of graduate teaching (especially in the context of the writing lab, a space with which many tenured profs continue to be unfamiliar but has become a disciplinary requirement for many who teach or would teach first year writing), in terms of media as object, in terms of media as tool, etc.
• further, we should think about new media as a tertiary retention of academic knowledge
  • I mean not only that we think about it in terms of the database that organizes our journals or our research objects
  • I mean, additionally, that we need to understand how new media stores the book, the logic of the book; that it does seems obvious, as new media was produced by a culture entirely conditioned by print (if we buy McLuhan’s argument); understanding new media as a tertiary retention of “book logic” (itself a redundant term) might be a first step in recognizing that the call to call digital work “scholarship” does not go nearly far enough in that it only returns new media to the logic that informed it but does not do enough to create the logic that it might inform
  • I mean, also, that we need to understand how new media and its attendant ergonomic supplements (the desk, the chair, the laptop stand, the KSM and now touchscreen interfaces) store the gestures, the embodiment as well as the mind the academic
  • we should understand as well how new media is a tertiary retention of academia in relation to its status of tertiary retention of other fields (especially that of business; it seems to me no coincidence that the rise of digital work in the humanities coincides with the casualization of its workforce and what Bousquet calls the informationalization of the university, although this relationship remains murky to me)
• in short, we need to think of new media in the context of Stiegler’s organology

• still need to discuss, perhaps, Stiegler’s critique of Marx
  • namely, S says Marx fails to separate the working class from the proletariat
  • this is because the proletariat is something that happens to workers as they are deskilled, as their knowledge of work becomes tertiary retention (as what they did is automated)
  • however, I think that this is unfair to Marx, as at the time it was mainly the working class who were proletarianized, I think
  • with the advent of expert systems, of cybernetics and the information age, we get the proletarianization of management and the bourgeoisie
  • I think that this proletarianization happens later for the most part as a development of capitalism away from the industrial model and the bourgeoisie/proletariat split
  • the current split (which is newer) of hacker/vectoralist, we see the spread of proletarianization to the vectoralists
  • consider in this context Bousquet’s discussion of the Yeshiva decision and the fact that capitalism has learned to consolidate the classes to either redirect/redistribute class antagonisms or to do away with them altogether
  • as the proletariat become managers, so too do managers become proletairianized

In For a New Critique of Political Economy, Stiegler writes:

The process of grammatization is the technical history of memory, in which hypomneisc memory continually reintroduces the constitution of a tension within anamnesic memory. This anamnesic tension is exterieorized in the form of works of the mind [or of spirit, espirit], through which epochs of psychosocial individuation and disindividuation are pharmacologically configured.

make sure to address Stiegler’s failure to think of new weapons, a la Deleuze

need to discuss the manner in which digital technologies STORE academic knowledge in the manner that the assembly line stores industrial gestures (that we once human); this is the process of proletarianization for Stiegler; how does this relate to new media in the humanities?

that would account for workforce casualization issues that in part determine the nature of graduate instruction. Protevi’s vocabulary is both useful and instructive for those of us involved in the study and teaching of language, literature,and culture, and when we use it to address the issues to which I now turn, we can easily see the manner in which such a political economy not only begins for each of us well before we enter the market, but how it extends to the time after we have left it (if we ever do).

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)

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

• Joe Posnanski: http://joeposnanski.si.com/feed/
  

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.

• Baseball Think Factory News Feed: http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/newsstand/rss_2.0/

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).

• Circling the Bases: http://bases.nbcsports.com/atom.xml
  

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.

• Rob Neyer: http://mlb.sbnation.com/authors/rob-neyer/rss

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

• Baseball Anaysts: http://baseballanalysts.com/index.rdf
  

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

• Fangraphs: http://feeds.feedburner.com/FanGraphs
  

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.

• ESPN’s Sweetspot: http://espn.go.com/blog/feed?blog=sweetspot
  

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.

Enjoy.

Syllabus

Daily schedule

Text list

Getting started with blogs and Google Reader

Instructions for blogging assignment

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.

Syllabus

Schedule

Text List

Short paper 1: Tolkien and Fairy Stories

Short paper 2: Fantasy and Genre

Short paper 3: Things and Power

Short paper 4: Horror and the Unknown

Short paper 5: Magic

Short paper 6: Realism

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.

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.

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