Open, Transparent, Tactical

I attended two sessions in a row concerned with the openness and the digital humanities. The first, Open Professoriate (#openprof), was concerned specifically with exposing the work of the academy to the public through social media. The second, Methods of Research in New Media (#606), had the broader goal of addressing new media methodologies, but came around addressing openness as a method. Though some of the same topics were raised that always come up (will this count for tenure, etc), I thought the speakers addressed academic openness from some really interesting angles. I am going mash the two sessions together here rather than follow the talk schedule.

One of the primary virtues of openning the professoriate was the potential to connect with and work with the public. Amanda French shared her experience of using social media to draw attention to a recent publication, arguing that putting our work online will earn more readers but only if there is no pay wall. David Parry seconded this suggestion by arguing that we must make public and open the default for our scholarship. This kind of openness would require that we see ourselves as accountable to the public and, as was brought up in the question sessions, address the public as a partner.

Openness, however, is not as easy as it sounds. Erin Templeton raised several questions about what we mean by "open" and asked how "openness" is challenged or compromized by openness itself. In her discussion, Templeton collapsed many versions of "open" in an attempt to complicate the optimism of the term. She spoke specifically of such practices as Yale's online courses, which offer the academy to the public, but in unidriectional communication. She also asked how open can a professor be online if their activities are surveilled by their department chairs and college deans.

She also discussed how few humanists are doing their work in public, suggesting that the small group that is "open" might mistake themselves for the whole show. The reality of this issue was made unavoiably apparent during the rest of the conference with allegations about a cliquish digital humanities star system. Matthew Kirshenbaum's response to that emergent discussion is particularly insightful in its honesty. He admits that "star systems" are how academic movements tend to happen, but the real key will be to see if digital humanities can avoid the pitfalls that come with it.

This conversation, however, fed nicely into Marcel O'Gorman's talk in which he argued for the value of closed systems. Quoting Cary Wolfe, O'Gorman suggested that for innovation to occur it is perhaps necessary to work in small groups, doing the kind of deep reading humanists have always done, just in digital spaces. This lead David Perry to revise the opposition between open and closed to propose transparent as the value we should seek putting or work online. The call for openness is not necessarily a call to include everyone all the time, but to show our work. It also recalled Mark Sample's provocation from the day before regarding the need for digital humanists to practice tactical alliances, to collaborate even with the those in the enemy camp, but remain fleet-footed and mobile.

At the same time, it matters less if we are tactical in our openness if we are not also tactical in what we are doing in public. Sam Cohen raised an extremely important point in the discussion about openness when he pointed out the supposed "crisis in the humanities" is not fundamentally about being open, closed, or transparent, but about the revaluation of culture and the changing role of the university. As the web comes to resemble the mall from Minority Report more than a public square and the university is restructured to run like a business, Gold asks in all seriousness, "do you think Newt Gingrich will read your blog?" And he has a real point.

The talks this weekend suggest we are continuing to come around from the early utopian potential of digitally enabled public intellectualism in the virtual public square. The call now is to redefine openness as transparent, tactical collaborations that are accountable to the public and skeptical of institutions. This involves recognizing that openness is not enough in itself to take advantage of what Alan Lui sees as the digital humanities's great opportunity to "serve the humanities." We have to continue to find ways for the open professoriate to answer Lui's question, “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities"?

***UPDATE*** (1/16/11) I want to thank Matt Gold for alerting me to a couple of mistakes. I had mistakenly attributed a talk to him that was actually given by Sam Cohen. All fixed now. Sorry for the confusion. 

Saturday Evening Poetics: Jazz and Jacket

There were two great poetry-related sessions on Saturday evening. The first was an interdisciplinary discussion of jazz and poetry organized by Aldon Nielsen. Patrick Pritchett kicked things off with an analysis of sonic patterns in John Taggart. Radical repetition, flirting with nonsense even as it insists and emphasizes, becomes, according to Pritchett, a material means to a spiritual end. Pritchett linked this repetition to Coltrane's explorations, that insistent sound that uses time to develop conceptual patterns and, ultimately, surprise. Surprise can become elation, and this is one of the ways I understood Pritchett's claim that sound can transform itself into something like a secular prayer in Taggart, an act of affirmative resistance:

To want to be a saint to want to be a saint to want to
to want to be a saint to be the snake-tailed one to want to
be snake-tailed with wings to be a snake-tailed saint with wings to
want to be a saint to want to awaken men wake men from nightmare. ("Giant Steps")

Affirmative prayers, mourning, and memory were also central to Meta DuEwa Jones's lively presentation on the genre of the "post-soul Coltrane poem." Jones called attention to the role of the body both as oeuvre, in the case of poems that recall and re-perform Coltrane's work, as well as physically, in reconstituting Coltrane's own physical presence and, in some poems, linking that presence, that sound, to other bodies. Jones concluded by attending to a beautiful example of the genre by Linda Susan Jackson, "September 15, 1963," a means of mourning racially-motivated violence in such a way that exemplifies Nate Mackey's claim that the dead will not rise without a song.

Michael New’s concluding paper explored the “expressive gap” between “jazz” and “poetry,” and the implications of that gap for genre formation and creativity. Beginning with Thelonius Monk’s claim that writing about jazz was akin to “dancing about architecture,” New pointed out that Monk’s simile is not merely dismissive of jazz writing. Indeed, the evolution of the notion of jazz itself speaks to the value of genre not as a controlling notion but, particularly in the case of jazz, as a process. I was reminded of Cecil Taylor’s parallel and interacting sonic levels in Unit Structures, a notion that has influenced Nate Mackey. New’s discussion of Gil Scott-Heron made me want to go dig up his albums.

One of the most interesting topics addressed in the discussion was the almost exclusive attention to bop/post-bop among poets influenced by or writing about jazz. Pritchett pointed out that this may have something to do with the perception that jazz becomes truly modern with bebop. Someone else made the point that pre-World War II jazz was still establishing an identity distinct from blues, which made me think about the possible histories of blues poetry. And, in light of the rising interest in the poetics of hip-hop, would it be too much to link the history of blues, jazz, and hip-hop to corresponding poetries, attending to differences and parallels.

Speaking of poetic histories, immediately following the jazz poetry panel there was a special session on Jacket magazine. It was great to hear about the origins of Jacket from its founding editor, John Tranter, as well as retrospective reflections, and thoughtful criticisms, from Kate Lilley and Marjorie Perloff. Michael Hennessey and Julia Bloch, two of the new editors of Jacket 2, were also on hand to discuss the future of the new magazine. It sounds as if there are some potentially exciting developments with other digital tools (maybe even a Jacket app?) and a deliberate effort to continue to build on Jacket’s already strong profile.

My one regret from Saturday evening was that I overestimated my conference energy and, as a result, was too tired and hungry to successfully make it to the MLA off-site poetry reading. I had a great time at the Philly off-site last year, and this year’s line-up looked really impressive. I hope there will be recordings of the event available at some point in the future.

Well, this is my last dispatch from LA. I had a great time, and learned a lot at MLA 2011. Thank you for following along, and thanks to Tim and Heather for their contributions (a particular thanks to Tim for setting up this blog!). I’d love to hear from other attendees as well, so please feel free to email me your thoughts and reflections.

Next year: Seattle!

Confessions of an Errant Academic

My name is Heather Stansbury, and I am yet another voice contributing to these posts from MLA 2011. My research interests are in Romanticism, eighteenth-century literature, and theories of gender and sexuality. First and foremost, I’d like to offer my sincere gratitude to the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for sponsoring this blog, and I’d like to thank my colleagues Tim Welsh and Paul Jaussen for their help and expertise in all things technological.

My contribution will be a reflection on the Presidential Forum, "Lives and Archives: Finding, Framing, and Circulating Narrated Lives Now." I’d like to begin with a confession that will no doubt be shocking, and perhaps appalling, to many: there are many things about academic conferences that I often do not like. However, this MLA has changed my mind about many of those things, and this session was the one of the best that I’ve attended. Each member of the panel was so deeply invested at both the intellectual and emotional level to her or his project. In her introduction, Sidonie Smith remarked on the heterogeneity of life writing, as well as the diversity of it, and the tales the panel told certainly demonstrated this. The discussion began with Marianne Hirsch’s and Leo Spitzter’s collaboration on the life of a young Jewish woman Ella who sacrificed her personal happiness for her family’s safety in order to escape Nazism. The words that circulated around the mystery of her eventual suicide, “self-murder” as the word translates, are striking: “blood poisoning, broken heart, tragic heroine, abandoned her husband, lovers, loose woman, home wrecker, pregnant divorcée, botched abortion.” The narrative and its resonance were heartbreaking. Spitzer and Hirsch co-delivered what was perhaps the most personal of the accounts related at the session. As I am currently teaching a writing course linked to an International Studies course on Israel, this talk spoke to me the most. It caused me to reflect on the other lives destroyed by the war and made palpable how very painful the process of recovering life narratives must sometimes be. Nancy Miller’s “Between Lost and Found” was also a project that began with personal loss, and David Palumbo-Lui’s narrative of the destruction and eventual rebuilding of the International Hotel in San Francisco demonstrated how narrating lives can bring diverse people together. One of the people who became involved in his project was a young artist named Jerome Reyes. One of his most visually striking creations was a red fedora and rug made of 2005 feathers dyed the same bright red as the hat. Remarkably, both pieces were made from the dust of the I-Hotel. As viewers walked through the exhibition, they would carry the dust of the hotel, indeed the dust of the narrative, on the bottoms of their shoes. I was struck by the notion of making art from the remnants of a destroyed building that was the site of a political protest that brought together diverse groups of advocates. The talk revealed the plurality of narrating lives, and as Palumbo-Lui so beautifully put it, their “poetic interplay.” Robert Warrior detailed his experience as curator of an exhibit by artist HOCK E AYE VI EDGAR HEAP OF BIRDS. Heap of Bird’s works critique state power and the ideology of white supremacy. For this particular project he created signs that reminded the people of Illinois that they reside on indigenous peoples’ homeland. Here is an example of the text on the signs:

Fighting Illini

Today your Host

Is

Kaskaskia

While the name of the indigenous people would change ― sometimes the sign read Peoria, Kickapoo, Sac, etc. ― the Fighting Illini always remained, and it was always printed in reversed letters. Shockingly, some of the signs were vandalized. Warrior’s investment in the project made his rendering of the narrative all the more moving. And I believe that it was this common element of all the talks that made this one of the best panels that I have had the pleasure of attending. The room the session was held in was enormous, and yet, there was a haunting sense of intimacy as the panelists narrated these lives, sharing bits of their own lives as they demonstrated what Smith calls “the labor and consequences of remembering.” The panel perhaps changed my mind about academic conferences. That being said, I end with another confession: my mother is visiting Los Angeles from Central California. It is the city where she grew up, and the city that I resided in for ten years. After a decade away from the city, I am struck by how nostalgic I have been feeling. I will not be attending sessions today, but rather going to the beach and other familial places with my mom. I have no doubt that this visit will help to define my own life narrative.

Thick Testimonies

When we seek testimony, where do we look and what do we look for? How do we ask for it? And how do we then read it? These three questions animated Friday's session on "Lives and Archives: Giving, Taking, and Circulating Testimony."

Leigh Gilmore began the conversation by considering how literary witnessing, the imaginative, creative, or speculative response to traumatic events, can "thicken" our understanding of those events, complementing and expanding other forms of testimony (legal, documentary, archival). She paid particular attention to those texts which cross the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, creative imaginings and personal accounts. Her case study was Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother, a text which, like much of Kincaid's work, draws heavily on her personal life while expanding those experiences through fictional devices. The result is a complex depiction of postcolonial Caribbean identity that offers a different conceptual, reflective space than the specific demands of, say, human rights discourse. Far from attempting to substitute the literary for the legal, Gilmore called for an interpretive practice similar to Kincaid's compositional strategy: reading across genres, expanding our notion of testimony to include the many texts that a traumatic history will produce.

In the second paper, William Craig Howes considered the responsibilities of researchers to their human subjects, a particularly significant question for humanists working in the field of life writing. Howes surveyed the existing protocols for such research, largely developed for the sciences, and compared them to the role of permission as it relates to biography, journalism, and ethnography. Precisely because researchers studying life narratives often maintain a personal relationship with their subjects, Howes proposed that we continue to develop a more flexible and responsive notion of "asking permission." By doing so, the humanity of those lives we are studying will emerge in a more full and cooperative way, potentially destabilizing rigid hierarchies between "researcher" and "subject." Such collaboration can enrich the stories we are trying to tell by transforming the way those tales are generated and performed.

Despite the advantages of greater collaboration, the exchanges between fractured lives can often present significant interpretive difficulties. Gillian Whitlock ended the panel by considering the tension between affective, interpersonal relationships and the larger structural forces in which those connections are situated. She took as her example a piece of embroidery gifted by a young Afghan asylum-seeker, detained by the Australian government on the Pacific island Nauru, to Elaine Smith, an Australian citizen who was advocating for and corresponding with the refugees. Whitlock pointed out that the archive of letters and photographs surrounding the piece testify to the individuality of both the giver and the receiver. Through this exchange, we can discover a narrative of compassion and mutual respect in the midst of a dehumanizing situation. And yet, the story is more complex, reflective of larger, transpersonal social and historical forces. The young man who made the embroidery piece developed his skill as a child laborer in Afghanistan, producing goods for a global consumer market. His flight to Australia was the result of international conflict and symptomatic structural inequalities on many levels. Whitlock suggested that reading the archive of exchange only for personal compassion and affective connection can cause us to lose sight of the larger histories in which those lives play out. And yet to deny the interpersonal is equally insufficient. Reading the embroidery, in this case, requires a double-vision: we must acknowledge individual, affective responses to injustice as well as a challenge the sufficiency of those exchanges.

I think it is interesting to note that Whitlock's doubled interpretive stance returns us to Gilmore's insistence that we recognize the testimonial significance of literary works and creative autobiography as well as juridical records or legal depositions. No single text, or kind of text, can give us the interpretive "thickness" that life stories, and particularly traumatic histories that cross the individual and the structural, the quotidian and the global, demand. I was reminded of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, a work that performs those multiple interpretations at once. Could it be that the poetic is essential to maintaining complex interpretations? Or, to ask the question in a different way, to what extent might poetry thicken our narrative lives?

Lives and Archives Q&A

Some various points that people have raised in the discussion:

--When constructing a family or personal archive, or developing a narrative for that past, are we trespassing in some way? Is there an ethical dilemma embedded in a desire to uncover the past?

Nancy Miller and Leo Spitzer responded individually, noting that the problem is a real one, but that, for themselves, the extent to which the uncovered narrative impinges upon the living guides their work.

--What does the I-Hotel site look like today?

--How is language contributing to the creolization in Mauritius?

--What stories do we choose when we decide to narrate a life? Doesn't everyone have a story to be told? What criteria inform the choice to narrate this life?

Robert Warrior noted, in response, that there is an autobiographical element to the archivist's work: to some extent, we assemble the archives that provokes us to narrate it. Marianne Hirsch followed-up by reminding us that life writing/archive projects are proliferating. I would imagine that digital technologies will only increase those archival options in exciting ways. Here's one available to MLA Conventioneers.

Fictional Lives, Historical Lives

David Palumbo-Liu has just presented on the interplay between history and the poetic as we narrate lives. He focused on the stories surrounding the now-demolished International Hotel (I-Hotel) in San Francisco, which was an important site in the struggle for low-income housing in SF. The various artistic response to this past include historical fiction, film, community readings, and a remarkable artistic installment which makes use of the dust (more dust) of the original hotel.

Palumbo-Liu pointed out that these artistic responses generate a remarkable circulation of narratives that crosses various locations. Poetic activity, in this case, becomes an evolving archive still in the process of composition.

Resonance and Dust

I'm in the middle of the Presidential Forum, "Lives and Archives: Finding, Framing, and Circulating Narrated Lives Now." Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have just co-delivered a fine account of Ella, a young woman who fled from Europe to Bolivia in the face of the rising Nazi threat. The archive that she has left behind--photographs, some letters, a few journal pages--carries with it, in Spitzer's words, "dust," read here not simply as patina and symptoms of age but also vulnerability, the fragility of a life.

Dust also seems to fill the gaps that the archive necessarily produces, the fact that it is always incomplete. Those gaps prompt a reading for, as Hirsch puts it, resonance and dissonance, the necessarily conflicted response to a catastrophic situation.

Nancy Miller, in the second paper of the panel, notes that entering an archive always includes the sense of missing someone or something. That haunting seems to me to be connected to dust and resonance. We'll see how these concepts evolves as the panel continues.