McPherson and Invisible Problems
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 3 Before jumping in to respond to the prompt here, I’ll admit I’m less inclined to follow McPherson’s line of thought between race and computer programing that seems rather thinly stretched (if we read race as biological race, that is). McPherson herself, in her attempts to clearly mark out her argument, appears to admit the tenuousness of the connection. She makes it clear that there was no intentional or conscious effort on the part of the computer engineers pioneering new systems of coding in the 1960s to further racist agendas or to create new, more insidious (because of their secrecy) forms of racism (149). The connection is not causal or even directly related, but a deeper, even invisible system that, despite its ephemeral nature, remains dangerous and invasive. From a simple rhetorical standpoint, these kinds of arguments invite suspicion. Arguing for the existence of something for which substantial evidence is virtually impossible to provide, and even further, arguing for systematic change because of that something, feels to rhetorically convenient to be real. Then again, this problem is shared by much of neo-Marxist and post-structuralist theory, so I’m not pointing the finger only at McPherson. Still, it seems someone has to acknowledge that the emperor’s not wearing anything.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 If I were reading this as a deconstructionist, I’d start pulling at this thread to see what postmodern assumptions and critical race theory might underlie her efforts here, but this probably isn’t the place for that.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 McPherson’s argument seems to become clearer near its end, and here she calls for the changes one might generally expect if we accept the premise she establishes in the prior pages. She suggests that we better understand the computing systems that we use every day and how these systems determine our relation to our world, that we avoid being pulled into a formalist movement that would bracket social aspects of our digital experiences, and that we must keep our analysis firmly planted in an awareness of the power of capital. Each of these suggestions is smart, and I think we can see the importance of each. I’m interested, as per the prompt, in the possible outcomes of pursuing these goals.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 A large part of McPherson’s argument seems to hinge on the fear of a formalist or structuralist narrowing of the object of study, like what we saw with literary criticism mid-century (and from which we imagine ‘hard’ sciences like computer science suffer generally). We might look at the study of literary criticism, then, for a lesson in how a push in the opposite direction might go.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 Following the New Critics, as we know, came the explosion of cultural study through the lens of the Frankfurt School. While we strove to maintain the practice of close reading through this shift, our focus shifted from literary texts to virtually anything else. We came to view texts as in part representative of the cultures from which they came, and studied texts primarily as cultural artifacts. And in doing so, we might have lost something. Or at least some critics think so. I’m thinking mainly of Harold Bloom, who, for all his charming cantankerousness, seems to get something right in saying that we lost a part of our taste for aesthetics when we sought out texts for their cultural value. In other words, if I can generalize, we privileged the social over the aesthetic, over the formal.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 3 In reading McPherson’s call to privilege the social—or at least to work actively to maintain the social as a major element—in the world of computer science world, I wonder if we risk a similar loss. I would certainly concede that our worldviews manifest in surprisingly and unexpected ways, and certainly our computer programming and the philosophies we hold up in that process would reveal our worldviews, there seems a danger in making computer science about what it’s not. We ought to be able to allow science to be science while acknowledging that it’s never perfectly objective and that is has effects beyond what we can see and touch. This is where the “humanities” part of digital humanities comes in, and there’s always important work to be done.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought this argument was a total stretch. I guess we have to wonder now, if she knows it’s tenuous, then why did she make the argument at all? Do you think she maybe did it this way in order to appeal more to the computer science people? Maybe she’s just trying to get them to see that humanities issues do impact the technological world, even on a software level. If that’s what she’s doing, I can at least applaud her effort towards a difficult task but, coming at her essay from a humanities standpoint, results in large criticism.
Indeed, I’d say you’re both in the majority in viewing McPherson’s argument in this way. Though I don’t think it’s correct to say that McPherson “knows [the argument is] tenuous” — to do so is to mischaracterize her claims, and to misunderstand her reasons for making it. McPherson’s admissions of “tenuousness” in this essay, I would argue, rather revolve around an awareness of her audience base: as she explains in the first 1/3 of her essay or so, she perceives that, due to disciplinary differences between cultural studies and DH practitioners, her argument is likely to appear tenuous to many readers. That’s not the same thing as admitting that it is, in fact, tenuous.
I’d like to see both of you take a more nuanced approach to your discussion of this and other texts. How might audience concerns be shaping the arguments that we see “hybrid” scholars (those who have allegiances to cultural critique and to DH methods) making?
I need some more specifics here, Cody, in order to keep pace with your line of critique.
For instance, you being by saying that you find McPherson’s argument to be “rather thinly stretched … if we read race as biological race.” But does McPherson’s essay invite or encourage that kind of a reading? Doesn’t her insistence on viewing race as a metaphor (rather than as a set of biological givens) rather suggest other approaches and other forms of reading? And how might reading race in terms of biological constraint alter your overall understanding of her essay?
Next, I disagree with the somewhat hasty statement that “From a simple rhetorical standpoint, these kinds of arguments invite suspicion.” What kinds of arguments? And suspicion from whom? And on what grounds? And according to what set of mandates, standards, or logic?
In fact, I would argue that humanists – myself included – are trained to consider the reverse angle and to view arguments that depend too neatly upon the rhetoric of causality with a rather fair degree of suspicion. As humanists, we are taught to value the process, the craft, and procedure (via dialectical thinking), not the cause or the results. So you appear to be distancing yourself from humanist thinking / procedural logic in arguing against McPherson’s rhetoric here – is that the case? If so, why?