HOT TYPE
Humanities Publishing at the MLA: Digital and Posthuman
By JENNIFER HOWARD
"How many of you want your first book to be electronic?" asked W.J.T.
Mitchell, longtime editor of the journal Critical Inquiry,
after a panel on "Professionalization in a Digital Age" at the Modern
Language Association's annual convention in Chicago.
Mr. Mitchell, a professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago,
directed the question at an audience largely made up of graduate students. Nobody
put up a hand. While that group has good reason to be drawn to digital publishing,
it also has reason to be wary, at least until tenure committees treat e-scholarship
as seriously as they do print monographs and journal articles.
The members of the audience had just heard N. Katherine Hayles,
a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, tell
them that "the future is yours to invent." They had been invited by
Jennifer Crewe, associate director and editorial director of
Columbia University Press, to join in "Rethinking the
First Book." (Ms. Crewe subtitled her talk "Dissertations as Bits
and Bytes.")
As editor of Critical Inquiry for three decades, Mr. Mitchell has been
party to more than a few theoretical revolutions. At the MLA, however, he sounded
downright conservative about the digital frontier in publishing and pedagogy.
"The students in my classroom complain about being too wired," he
told his listeners. "What is it the digital is supposed to be triumphing
over?"
We must "criticize, analyze, historicize, and above all resist the easy
routines that technology offers," he argued. He used a Johnny Mnemonic-like
term to argue that technology amounts to nothing without biological entities
(us) to use it: "At the end of the day, wetware rules."
"What can we say back to technology?" he asked. "Saying that
we are posthuman has been a good polemical start" - implying that the rhetoric
was useful but not enough.
***
That comment invoked one of the MLA's unofficial themes of the meeting: posthumanism.
The idea is not new. Almost a decade ago, for instance, Ms. Hayles published
an influential book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
But the notion has gotten a boost lately. One example: The University
of Minnesota Press just inaugurated a series on posthumanism edited
by Cary Wolfe, a professor of English at Rice University. First
out in the series is a reissue of Michel Serres's The Parasite.
As the Minnesota press Web site describes it, the book "uses fable to explore
how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body.
Among Serres's arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major
players in public dialogue - creating diversity and complexity vital to human
life and thought."
Other books in the series so far include The Poetics of DNA, by Judith
Roof, a professor of English and film studies at Michigan State University,
which "reveals the ideological effects of DNA metaphors and stories,"
and When Species Meet, by Donna J. Haraway, a professor in the history-of-consciousness
program at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
***
At a party thrown by Critical Inquiry, the University of Chicago
Press, and Chicago's Division of the Humanities, Mr. Wolfe tried to
distill posthumanist thought for a reporter. If she understood him correctly
- the jazz stylings of Yoko Noge's Jazz Me Blues combo made conversation a tad
difficult - the general idea is that posthumanism displaces the Renaissance-humanist
idea of man (or wetware, in Mr. Mitchell's parlance) as the proper object of
study. It sets us into context alongside other, nonhuman entities as well as
our own technologies.
The Minnesota press describes the series this way: "Posthumanities investigates
the many ways that the human has been entangled in complex relations with animals,
the environment, and technology for which the theoretical and ethical understandings
of humanism are no longer adequate."
The series got a nice, extra-academic boost recently when the cyberpunk writer
Bruce Sterling posted about it over at Beyond the Beyond, his
Wired magazine blog. Mr. Sterling welcomed the series, although he did point
out that "the posthuman is quite an old sci-fi concept now." One of
his readers commented that "it's a regular academic industry already. Those
cult-studs are old news."
The Critical Inquiry party, incidentally, was supposed to be in honor
of the venerable deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller but turned
out to be a surprise bash for Mr. Mitchell, organized to mark his 30 years as
the journal's editor. Mr. Mitchell was presented with a special issue of his
own journal, and he and Mr. Miller traded jokes about which of them could really
claim to be a parasite.
Mr. Miller's essay in the special issue, "What Do Stories About Pictures
Want?," riffs off Mr. Mitchell's well-known book What Do Pictures Want?
The Lives and Loves of Images (University of Chicago Press, 2005). The
essay contains a line that humanists and posthumanists both might appreciate:
"All criticism has that slightly sinister motive of putting the text or
painting and its maker in their place."
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Faculty
Volume 54, Issue 18, Page A14, January 11, 2008
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