Golumbia isn’t letting us go that easy.
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 I read my article printed out from the LARB website directly, not from your PDF, so I apologize if our pagination is off.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 Toward the end of the essay the authors note an aspect of the kind of backlash they expect to receive. “We know we will be read as outsiders” [18]. They say this right before turning to Alan Liu, which is a move that does three things. One, it supports the claims they make about funding agencies and neoliberal or corporate structures. Two, it shows that they do know what other Digital Humanists are saying. Three, it looks just like we expect scholarship to, building [in the metaphorical sense] on one another’s writing.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 4 What makes “Neoliberal Tools” so different as a piece of DH scholarship is its willingness to engage with the political. As classmates you likely all can tell how I’ll side on this part of the debate: I agree that literary analysis is political and that is okay and that it is valid. I think almost every kind of scholarship is political. Even if the results of research seem benign, they exist within [and even for] a University, an openly political body. When we think of DH as something that is engaged in conversation of University structure, critical debate, and political power, it is easier to imagine being “afraid” of it. All semester we have poked empty fun at imaginary luddites who are afraid of DH in the way our grandparents are afraid of iPads [see what I did there? It’s so easy, to imagine this scared people.] These imaginary people are not afraid in the same way Golumbia et al are afraid; they are concerned about a larger trend in the university structure. The authors may at worst seem a bit conspiratorial, particularly on page 16. “Why these funders [NEH and the Mellon Foundation, as examples] choose to do this remains something of a mystery. To find precise explanations, we would need to have access to private conversations and communications, though it is remarkable that such an epoch-making shift can be so lacking in explicit justification.”
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 2 Is this a factual account of DH’s rise as a discipline? I’m inclined to believe Golumbia and friends as much as I am anyone else. If there is anyone here who is an outsider, I would throw that label at myself before any of our authors. Sure enough, Golumbia has a twitter. He’s on a number of twitter “lists” related to academia, media, and digital technology. People like Kirshenbaum might say that’s the threshold it takes to critique DH, so that shouldn’t be the issue then.
Yes: all excellent points here re: the authors’ use of Liu. I think you do a nice job of assessing their rhetorical motivations here.