McGann2004

A Note on the Current State of Humanities Scholarship

by Jerome McGann

A widespread malaise

A widespread malaise has been notable in our discipline for more than a decade, particularly among those heavily invested in humanities research education. One of the sources of this malaise—it has many—was addressed in a special letter sent to the members of the MLA in May 2002 by Stephen Greenblatt, the organization's president. Greenblatt pointed to publishing conditions that make it difficult or even impossible for young scholars to meet current standards for tenure in research departments of literature. He called the problem, correctly, a systemic one. For many years, a network of relations has bound together the work of scholarship, academic appointment, and paper-based—in particular, university press—publishing. This network has been breaking up, or down, for many years, and the pace of its unraveling has recently accelerated. In a grotesque inversion of our most basic goals, near-term economics, not long-term scholarship, has been a serious factor in humanities research for some time. Just try to find a publisher for primary documentary materials or for any basic research that doesn't come labeled for immediate consumption—sell this by such and such a date, before it spoils.

A digital savior?

Do you see a digital savior waiting to descend? Do you think I see this redeemer? Well, I don't. But because these broad institutional problems intersect with the emergence of digital technology, we won't usefully address the former unless we come to terms with the latter.

Consider this

Consider this. For as long as I've been an educator a system of apartheid has marked literary and cultural studies. On one hand, we have editing and textual studies, on the other, theory and interpretation. I don't have to tell you which of these two classes of work has been regarded as menial if somehow also necessary. And like any system of apartheid, both groups have been corrupted by it. As Don McKenzie once remarked, material culture is never more grossly perceived than it is by theoreticians, whose ideas tend to remove them from base contacts with the physical objects that code and comprise material culture. As he went on to remark, the gross theoretician met his match in the myopic scholar, who gets lost in the forest by trancing on the bark of the trees.

I am sometimes suspected

When I describe our recent educational history in these terms, I am sometimes suspected of fellow-traveling with a cadre of moralizers and educational instrumentalists. But, remember, Bennett, Bloom, DeSousa, and Lynne Cheney are not enemies of theory or interpretation; they are simply strict constructionists in a field where Cornell West, Catharine Stimpson, Edward Said, and Stanley Fish have been looking to broaden our ancient ideal of liberal education. Seeing the educational history of the past fifteen or twenty years in terms of the celebrated struggles between these groups has obscured our view of an educational emergency now grown acute with the proliferation of digital technology.

Let me make a forecast

Let me make a forecast: In the next fifty years the entirety of our inherited archive of cultural works will have to be reedited within a network of digital storage, access, and dissemination. This system, which is already under development, is transnational and transcultural. Let's say this prophecy is true. Now ask yourself these questions: Who is carrying out this work, who will do it, and who should do it? These turn to sobering queries when we reflect on the recent history of higher education in the United States. Just when we will be needing young people well-trained in the histories of textual transmission and the theory and practice of scholarly method and editing, our universities are seriously unprepared to educate such persons. Electronic scholarship and editing necessarily draw their primary models from long-standing philological practices in language study, textual scholarship, and bibliography. As we know, these three core disciplines preserve but a ghostly presence in most of our Ph.D. programs.

Digital forms

Editorial and interpretational projects in digital forms are now being designed and executed and will proliferate. Departments of literary study have perhaps the greatest stake in these momentous events, yet they are—in this country—probably the least involved. At the April meeting of the editorial board of Critical Inquiry, not a person in the room seemed to know what TEI was/is (the Text Encoding Initiative) and how it was/is transforming the entire core of our work as humanists (for example, the library). We are laboring today under seriously underfunded intellectual conditions.

Scholarly tools in digital forms

Force of circumstance today calls us to develop scholarly tools, editorial and hermeneutic, in digital forms. But few scholars are undertaking such work and the ones that do are, with only the rare exception, involved in editorial, archival, or linguistic projects. "The Higher Criticism" remains tied, theoretically and methodologically, to bibliographical

The explosion of digital textualities

Of course the humanities scholar, like everyone else, sees the explosion of digital textualities and can readily understand in a general way the import of what is happening. But how prepared are we to emulate the humanists of the fifteenth century who were confronted with a similar upheaval of their materials, means, and modes of knowledge production? Observing the event in our own time, Sven Birkerts has advised us to a great refusal.

Very bad advice

That very bad advice does little justice to the power and usefulness of the book, which has been our simulation machine of choice for centuries. Now more than ever we want to study the complex mechanisms of book technology in order to design digital environments of comparable sophistication. Think how brilliantly the bibliographical interface organizes our reflective and perceptual experience. It can hold large amounts of different kinds of data and information. At the same time, it sends a clear message that such materials, however rich and strange, are integrated and negotiable. It facilitates many ways of passaging and repassaging its materials and of hyperlinking to related materials in and out of books. It leaves us free to understand each in our own ways, and it supplies a bibliographical network ready to receive and feed those diverse readings back into the emergent discourse field.

Contemporary digital interface design

Compared with that, contemporary digital interface design often seems—often is—less help than hindrance. Bibliography and the sociology of texts are key points of departure for anyone who wants to understand and design digital environments. Reciprocally, digital environments expose the bibliographical discourse field in important new ways. Hypertext, cybertext, ergodic literature: it's true, we have always already been there in our traditional literary forms and functions. But the common reader's view of these comparable technologies is important to remember. People generally think that digital fields are more complex and dynamic than bibliographical ones.

Difference in scale

That difference in scale, which is both real and apparent, is important less for its reality than its apparency. I'm not simply being paradoxical in speaking thus. The information whiteout pervading digital space signals impoverished interface functions. In this context we have much to learn from bibliographical design and the sophisticated information systems to which they are integrated. The codes of simulation operating through printed works are at once robust and amazingly flexible. The passage into digital culture should be made—can only be made, in my opinion—through a reengagement with print culture. It must and will be so because, like Aeneas passing from Troy to Latium, we cannot leave our household gods behind. In this move back to the future we will find ourselves arriving where we started but now beginning to know that bibliographical place for the first time.

Physicists tell us

Physicists tell us that a quantum world thunders silently beyond (or below) our human scale of perception. It is a world full of contradictions where everything is as it is perceived and so everything changes depending on where and how and why you choose to take your observations. In one perspective photons are wave functions, in another they are particles. It is a world of random order and disorder. We were only finally able to establish regular contact with this world after the invention of statistical mathematics. To the end of his life Einstein disbelieved in the reality of quantum worlds, maintaining they were nothing more than a set of (more or less useful) mathematical functions.

The quantum order of bibliographical objects

Reality or apparition, a quantum order of bibliographical objects becomes accessible to us through computerization. I am not speaking about the physico-chemical makeup of paper objects but of the immense number of dynamic relations and functions that comprise the discourse field of social texts. We touch the hem of this garment whenever we open a web browser. The field of textual relations accessible through that digital device is statistically significant at a quantum order. People are trying to build quantum computers precisely to improve controlled access to that discourse field.

We have our hands full

When such computers are built and made stable enough to be used, history tells us they will have very clumsy interfaces. In the meantime, we have our hands full trying to design interfaces for our current digital tools and systems. We must have them in order to translate the computer's statistical operations into terms that our embodied minds can seize, understand, and put to human uses. The need is especially apparent when the database is a bibliographical discourse field. The interface we have built for The Rossetti Archive is dismayingly inadequate to the archive's dataset of materials. At present the archive organizes some 10,000 distinct files, about half of which are SGML/XML files. When the archive reaches its scheduled completion date some four years from now, it will have about twice as many files.

200,000 hyperlinks

Now take those files and understand that they are interconnected by a set of some 200,000 hyperlinks. Then add to your equation the fact that every SGML/XML text file is structurally divided in hundreds of ways. Finally, factor in the specific divisionary instances that comprise any particular file, which will range from several hundreds to many thousands. I could ask the server holding the archive to make the actual counts in each case, but I think you can see the staggering number of possible relationships that the archive puts into computational play.

Social texts are quantum fields

Let me close with what is for me—a fetishist of imaginative writing, especially poetry—the most important moral of this story: poems and other imaginative kinds of social texts are quantum fields. Although we have said for a long time that their meanings are inexhaustible, pursuing a sociologics of textuality in a digital frame of reference helps us to specify more clearly why and how this is the case. I do not offer the quantum poem as a useful metaphor but as a fact about the facts comprising poetic discourse fields—a computable fact. The implications of that view of social textuality for humanities studies seem to me considerable. The game of interpretation we are developing at the University of Virginia, IVANHOE, is an early effort to work out those implications for a program of what I. A. Richards called practical criticism. At Virginia we call it Patacriticism, taking inspiration from Alfred Jarry's remarkable "science of imaginary solutions." Like Byron's, Jarry's ludic intelligence is no joking matter. From Ubu and Dr. Faustroll emerges an algorithmic form of scholarly method that should be seriously entertained (so to say). It may be the only reliable method for the textual condition we now see clearly unfolding before us.