Against Scarcity

Writing on his blog, The Pinocchio Theory, literary and cultural critic Steven Shaviro argues that “scarcity is equivalent, in theological terms, to original sin.” “We can never know abundance,” Shaviro continues, “because we have been expelled from the Garden of Eden.” Shaviro is not speaking literally here, nor does he invoke a biblical utopia in order to lament a lost state of perfection. His invocation is rather meant to describe our neoliberal present: a Darwinian/Malthusian state in which “producers must always battle over limited resources” and “consumers must always decide how to allocate limited means.”3 The efficacy of this logic is plain in our contemporary world. However, the import of Shaviro’s argument lies in the fact that our “sin” is self-imposed. We live and adapt to scarcity because we make it a material reality.

For those of us who are able to call it an intellectual home, the university is among the most intimate sites within which logics of scarcity affect us. We know scarcity because its imposition defines the scope of our labor. More fundamentally, it threatens what the university represents. Chandra Talpade Mohanty identifies this precise problem in her 2003 Feminism without Borders, writing, “[The university] is that contradictory place where knowledges are colonized but also contested—a place that engenders mobilizations and progressive movements of various kinds. It is one of the few remaining spaces in a rapidly privatized world that offers some semblance of a public arena for dialogue, engagement, and visioning of democracy and justice.”4 The privatized world that she invokes is here, and its effects on the university are manifest.

Consider the stark statistical realities of the recent downturn in humanities work from the “Preliminary Report on the MLA Job Information List, 2016–2017” as an illustration of this point:

In 2016–17, the downturn in jobs advertised in the MLA Job Information List (JIL) continued for a fifth consecutive year. [ . . . ] The declines of the past five years bring the number of advertised jobs to yet another new low, below the level reached after the severe drop between 2007–08 and 2009–10. The 851 jobs in the English edition for 2016–17 are 249 (22.6%) below the 1,100 advertised in 2009–10. The 808 jobs in the foreign language edition are 214 (20.9%) below the 1,022 advertised in 2009–10.5

Consider also Ryan Cordell’s anecdotal interpretation of such data: “There are no assistant professorships because administrators can’t replace positions in English departments because English majors are down because English classes do not sufficiently enroll.”6 Taken together, this bleak state of American higher education clarifies Shaviro’s argument. Attributing loss to a lack of enrollment gives it coherence. However, not all disciplines are affected equally. As Matthew K. Gold has acknowledged, DH’s late rise to prominence is predicated on austerity measures that, at least in recent history, belie such anecdotal interpretations:

At a time when many academic institutions are facing austerity budgets, department closings, and staffing shortages, the digital humanities experienced a banner year that saw cluster hires at multiple universities, the establishment of new digital humanities centers and initiatives across the globe, and multimillion-dollar grants distributed by federal agencies and charitable foundations [ . . . ] Clearly, this is a significant moment of growth and opportunity for the field, but it has arrived amid larger questions concerning the nature and purpose of the university system.7

The truth of Gold’s statement is indisputable. DH’s growth arrived amid a wave of austerity, a wave that has continued to reshape the humanities. The questions that follow Gold’s statement are worth paraphrasing. Is DH meant to redefine the nature and purpose of humanistic practice? Is it meant to reshape the university system? Does DH need theory and politics in order to accurately assess its rapid growth? Any response to these questions is already situated within the material contrast between scarcity and abundance and thus within a larger political frame.

What, then, of abundance? The difficulty of conceptualizing abundance beyond its narrow contrast to scarcity looms large in this discourse. DH in particular has fashioned itself as a humanistic discipline best positioned to obtain scarce resources. DH is a “tactical term,” Matthew Kirschenbaum argues, which functions as “a rare vector for jujitsu” at “a moment when the academy in general and the humanities in particular are the objects of massive and wrenching changes.”8 DH’s ability to attract and obtain funding is “simultaneously serving to position the humanities at the very forefront of certain value-laden agendas [ . . . ] while at the same time allowing for various forms of intrainstitutional mobility as new courses are approved, new colleagues are hired, new resources are allotted, and old resources are reallocated.”9 These gains are certainly a first step toward securing DH’s disciplinary influence but are now perhaps prototypical of more radical approaches. The draw to manage scarcity is alluring but is not yet abundant under Shaviro’s figuration of economic thinking.10 CUS and CUS-related work shows us just how difficult overcoming logics of scarcity actually is.

In his 2008 Unmaking the Public University, for example, Christopher Newfield traced how our concepts of merit and competition are racialized from legislature down to university infrastructure, disallowing egalitarian modes of distribution to operate.11 Kristen Monroe et al.’s study and subsequent 2008 article, “Gender Equality in Academia: Bad News from the Trenches, and Some Possible Solutions” show how merit and competition are discriminatory via processes of gendered devaluation, equally limiting egalitarian modes of distribution within institutional infrastructures.12 CUS collectives like the Edu-factory Collective have gone as far as to liken the university to a factory in which knowledge is automated, commodified, and made precarious, thus demanding autonomous control over its oppressive modulation.13 Finally, Mohanty turns facts like these into rallying points, arguing that feminist literacy in particular “necessitates learning to see (and theorize) differently—to identify and challenge the politics of knowledge that naturalizes global capitalism and business-as-usual in North American higher education.”14 These brief references are only a starting point but all presuppose a similar argument: the university already has resources that it does not distribute equitably. The point is to compel equity for all as new modes of organization and forms of knowledge are pursued.

Abundance is thus something other than a perspectival shift regarding our finances. Abundance, we might conclude, begins with refusal. Abundant thinking demands a politics of knowledge that refuses scarcity at its moment of departure and its horizon. It is, as Shaviro would have it, a site of conflict, but also the movement toward the common: “Scarcity is never a problem for capitalism; only abundance is.” “For once scarcity has been overcome,” he argues, “there’s nothing left to drive competition.”15 Which varieties of DH refuse scarcity’s imposition? What formation of DH/CUS might create the work of the common?

Differential Infrastructures

CUS, like DH, often imagines its work to be that of transforming academic institutions. It claims to be an insurgent disciplinary force positioned against technocratic influence and neoliberal demand. To quote Jeffrey J. Williams, CUS “focuses on the consequences of corporate methods and goals, like corrupting research and increasing managerial (as opposed to academic) control, cutting labor through reducing regular faculty positions (while increasing adjunct positions), and exploiting students by requiring them to work more and take on more debt.”16 CUS does so with abandonment, not from an ideal position but from a material one, recasting our present academic-corporate situation at the divide between abundance and scarcity.

Of the CUS work that forwards this logic, the conclusion to Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University is perhaps the most accessible. After a sustained exegesis of the UC system’s acquiescence to austerity and conservative cultural politics over the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Newfield positions CUS as a transformative methodological operation at the infrastructural level, advocating for numerous institutional remedies to the cultural and economic interests that undermine higher education. Newfield’s intervention is vital because of the concrete rallying points it provides from which to act. Akin to Mohanty’s argument, Newfield pairs the managerial demand placed on humanistic disciplines in particular with a liberatory politics that refuses the university’s continuous contour toward corporate directives. The most pertinent imperatives of the five that Newfield proposes are the following: “First, racial equality needs to be reaffirmed as a value and as a goal.” “Third, the university needs to be understood as an engagement in forms of individual and collective development that cannot be captured in economic terms.” “Fifth, public universities need to insist on the value of understanding societies beyond their status as commercial markets.”17

Newfield’s imperatives are, parallel to DH concerns, a realization of transformative critique. His fifth imperative embodies this in particular. Conceptualizing universities beyond their status as commercial markets is certainly something that DH can assist in, and his first imperative is already apparent in movements like #transformDH and #DisruptDH. Think of Moya Bailey et al.’s “Reflections on a Movement: #transformDH, Growing Up.” The piece opens with an apposite quote from Fiona Barnett: “What happens when we shift difference away from a deficit that must be managed and amended (with nods in the direction of diversity).” What happens when we shift difference “toward understanding difference as our operating system, our thesis, our inspiration, our goal”?18 The type of refusal that Barnett forwards is predicated on a conceptualization of value that cannot be captured economically. When she redirects the question of difference away from deficit and management, she moves toward a kind of heterogeneity that opposes business as usual in North American higher education. This is affirmed by Bailey et al. when they expand their call for politics’ centrality in DH work: “Higher education in the United States is in a moment of simultaneous hope and despair. While individual actors recognize the need for a deeper commitment to social justice in the academy, universities have fired professors at the behest of powerful trustees and donors, threatening academic freedom.”19 When value is conceptualized politically, beyond the problem of its management, its abundance is perhaps more threatening but is also liberatory. “Getting things done” from this position demands that we protect those most vulnerable to the university’s inequities while building alternatives to scarcity. Abundance is shifting difference toward our goal.

In the introduction to their coedited anthology Disrupting the Digital Humanities, Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel have also taken a stand against neoliberal imperatives informing DH praxis, affirming many points made here,

we take for this volume [ . . . ] to decenter the digital humanities narrative vis-à-vis new critical voices, new languages, new locations, and new methodologies that reimagine DH as not the seamless products of neoliberal governments and non-profit capitalism, but the work of people, labor, and voices at the margins creating friction and fantasy, mapping edges and new locations, playing slanted and in glitches with distributed resources and global communities.20

Stommel and Kim locate abundance in the interdisciplinary alliances that we make rather than in resource accrual or managerial logics. It is a simple inversion of imposed scarcity but a concrete point of reorganization from which refusal is prioritized alongside egalitarian models for intellectual labor. The concrete realities of nurturing this position, however, are much more difficult to implement.

Before analyzing arguments over infrastructure in more detail, I briefly explore two examples that forward the commitment to differential infrastructural work, one from DH and one from CUS. Both speak to the needs identified by the abundant thinkers mentioned here.

Consider first Roopika Risam’s argument in “Navigating the Global Digital Humanities: Insights from Black Feminism” that DH is simultaneously global and local—a complex of intersecting methods, tools, and interests that frame the discipline:

As the field of digital humanities has grown in size and scope, the question of how to navigate a scholarly community that is diverse in geography, language, and participant demographics has become pressing. [ . . . ] From the work of GO::DH in particular, an important perspective has emerged: digital humanities, as a field, can only be inclusive and its diversity can only thrive in an environment in which local specificity—the unique concerns that influence and define digital humanities at regional and national levels—is positioned at its center and its global dimensions are outlined through an assemblage of the local.21

Risam’s description of DH organization fulfills all three of Newfield’s criteria discussed previously and also adds a fourth: global scaffolding based on local needs. This insight is vital for DH’s infrastructural turn and vital for DH’s articulation of difference. Risam’s model is relational, needs-based, and diverse without any compulsion toward homogeneity. “The challenge,” Risam has argued, “is not to let hegemonic local forms—such as practices or debates taken for granted in the United States—overdetermine the definition of digital humanities globally.”22 Indeed, this argument is reaffirmed in her chapter in this volume, “Stewarding Place.”23 When she writes of DH work outside of R1 models, Risam affirms a radically contingent mode of DH organization and infrastructure in the pursuit of common goals.

This concept is reaffirmed in a second CUS example that operates between local and global iterations of its politics. Writing of their work with CAFA (Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa), George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici comment on institutional formations like those that Risam identifies. On Caffentzis and Federici’s view, a globalized vision of the university requires that we see “the continuity of our struggle through the difference of our places in the international division of labor, and to articulate our demands and strategies in accordance to these differences and the need to overcome them.”24 Scarcity is further refused in their figuration of common labor. Where the majority of “Africans do not have access to the Internet or for that matter even the telephone; even the miniscule minority who does, has access to it only for limited periods of time,” conceptualizing value—particularly the value of education—beyond commercial markets is neither easy nor universal.25 In their view, there isn’t a digital cure-all to the current imposition of scarcity in the African communities they work with. They go on to argue that “We cannot cast the ‘cognitive’ net so widely that almost every kind of work becomes ‘cognitive’ labor, short of making arbitrary social equations and obfuscating our understanding of what is new about ‘cognitive labor’ in the present phase of capitalism.”26 To do so would undermine both global and local efforts, disallowing common goals to emerge.

If local needs are to be taken seriously, if infrastructure is tactical and contingent, this cited work begins to outline a coalitional standard for educational infrastructure that forefronts difference in its refusal of scarcity. Abundance is present in localized sites of knowledge production whose material conditions shape the character of their labor and thus the possibility of its participation in global initiatives focused on collective development. Both are a question of infrastructure. Both are radical expressions of the common. What infrastructure signifies—how it came to be DH’s horizon of disciplinary development—contours the DH/CUS connection.

There is perhaps no better place to explore DH’s contemporary focus on infrastructure than Alan Liu’s now infamous blog post, “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity.” There, Liu summarizes his interest in critical infrastructure studies as a “call for digital humanities research and development informed by, and able to influence, the way scholarship, teaching, administration, support services, labor practices, and even development and investment strategies in higher education intersect with society.”27 Where Liu goes so far to say that most, if not the whole of our lives, are organized through institutional mechanisms formative of a “social-cum-technological milieu,” “the word ‘infrastructure’ give[s] us the same kind of general purchase on social complexity that Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and others sought when they reached for their all-purpose word, ‘culture.’”

This claim is motivated by three logical moments on Liu’s view, paralleling James Smithies’ claim to a postfoundationalist approach to DH praxis. His logical moments proceed as follows: (1) “critique recognizes that the ‘real,’ ‘true,’ or ‘lawful’ groundwork (i.e., infrastructure) for anything, especially the things that matter most to people, such as the allocation of goods or the assignation of identity, is ungrounded”; (2) “critique then goes antifoundationalist to the second degree by criticizing its own standing in the political-economic system—a recursion effect attested in now familiar, post-May-1968 worries that critics themselves are complicit in elitism, ‘embourgeoisment,’ ‘recuperation,’ ‘containment,’ and majoritarian identity, not to mention tenure” and (3) “critique seeks to turn its complicity to advantage—for example, by positioning critics as what Foucault called embedded or ‘specific intellectuals’ acting on a particular institutional scene to steer social forces.”28

Here, Liu has offered a mode of infrastructural critique that preserves the radical possibilities inherent to cultural critique as it places them within DH praxis. This argument is shored up in his reliance on Michel Foucault’s specific intellectual. To remind, Foucault’s consideration of this figure in “Truth and Power” does not situate her as “the master of truth and justice” but rather as a radically contingent political actor.29 The figure is situated at “points where their own conditions of life or work situate them (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family and sexual relations).”30 The point then is to interrogate the conditions under which the subject is determined, to understand their structural formation, and further “to develop lateral connections across different forms of knowledge and from one focus of politicisation to another.”31 Following Foucault, Liu’s argument culminates in a critical DH method that signifies our “ability to treat infrastructure not as a foundation, a given, but instead as a tactical medium that opens the possibility of critical infrastructure studies as a mode of cultural studies.”32

Paired with Risam’s work, Liu’s post draws us closer to a profound DH/CUS pairing. Two features of Liu’s and Risam’s arguments draw out this point. First, Liu’s argument offers a strategic intervention in DH’s complicity with neoliberal educational imperatives. His antifoundationalism makes space for self-critique as DH extends into new arenas of influence. Second, Risam’s work formalizes a global/local concept within DH praxis at the same time that she considers the question of diversity as an imbalance of power—an imbalance that implies socioeconomic difference. This feature of Risam’s work dovetails with Mohanty’s concern for a transformative concept of feminist literacy, especially where Mohanty claims that “Perhaps the only way to fight the corporatization of the university [ . . . ] is to link this struggle with other anti-corporatization struggle (e.g., the anti-World Trade Organization movement).”33 The global/local focus in contemporary DH is thus a tactical opening to rework Liu’s remarks on thinking critical infrastructure as a form of cultural studies, complicating the kinds of partnerships we make with noneducational entities.

Paired with Federici and Caffentzis’s work, Liu’s arguments are problematized. Federici and Caffentzis prioritize autonomy over strategic complicities in their egalitarian vision of the university’s future. The university’s alliances are thus far more tactical and perhaps far more wary of technocratic influence. This further outlines a problem of difference. To reaffirm the abundant political DH thinkers mentioned previously, if difference is our thesis, it demands the reconstruction of merit, the valorization of plurality, and the support of these irreducible to economic rationalization. This extends to the character of our labor, including a skepticism of the digital, and thus to the strategic alliances that we make. The tension between the demand for autonomy and the need for infrastructural longevity is thus productive of any DH/CUS pairing moving forward.

Autonomous Institutionality

This essay concludes by prioritizing a model that forefronts political consensus building, prior to any act of “thinking big,” from within the university. Opposing institutional inequities requires such work, and our political goals are not always transparent or neatly aligned. This concluding section is therefore the most provocative. What would it mean for DH to situate itself within a lineage of political autonomy rather than its own technological and infrastructural development? How might we begin the process?

In her article “Digital Humanities for the Next Five Minutes,” Rita Raley has argued that “the digital humanities should not, and cannot, bear the burden of transforming technocracy, the academic-corporate situation in which we are all mired.”34 What Raley ultimately proposed radically departs from large-scale infrastructure projects and tool-building. She has proposed a kind of dialectical inversion of DH’s protected status. The abundance that DH has garnered demands its alignment with critical approaches that also interrogate the material realities of university infrastructure. “Perhaps more than other academic professional communities,” Raley has written,

digital humanists need continually to work to perceive and negotiate the institutional imaginary of informational technology so as not to fall into the trap of unconsciously adopting its optics. This institutional imaginary informs the conditions of our labor. It shapes intellectual rhythms according to administrative calendars and asks that we adopt the habit of innovating for the next grant cycle [ . . . ] We ought, in my view, to be marshalling the full critical, philosophical, and rhetorical resources at our disposal in order to think about the very universities in which we are embedded, their organizational structures, instrumentalities, and governing ideas.35

Raley’s tactics are not so much a matter of preserving DH’s permanence in any of its current iterations. Raley positions DH’s alignment with resource accrual as a necessary site of CUS intervention as she demonstrates the tactical application of her politics: embrace the scarcity that surrounds DH in order to strengthen disciplinary and institutional bodies holistically. The politics of Raley’s position demand contingent applications—and the applications also demand small-scale beginnings.

But what of the common? The common is simply another name for tactical acts of refusal that redefine our educational infrastructures. Indeed, Raley’s work establishes a political rearticulation of DH’s abundance and reclamation of the tactical as a mode of refusal. It does so at the height of DH’s interest in large-scale infrastructural development. CUS’s emphasis on postcapitalist modes of relation, organization, and knowledge production is the radical prefiguration of the critical engagements that Raley names. Consequently, the common cannot be conceived as “a good to be defended or protected,” as the Edu-Factory Collective has written.36 It rather defines “the affirmation of social cooperation’s autonomy and self-organization.”37 Under this figuration of the common, we are not limited to a choice between the corporate logic of the contemporary university (privatization) and the total rejection of its infrastructure (public utopia). Rather, the common maximizes our embeddedness and our complicity in the imposition of scarcity as it also demands that we radically depart from market logics and corporate values.

Articulating the collective feature of DH’s political character in this way is perhaps the weightiest wager made by the DH/CUS pairing. It demands that we conceptualize infrastructure as a constellation of autonomous institutional incursions, both local and global, that refuses the imposition of scarcity. To adopt CUS terminology, the political demand that thinking DH and CUS together results in a “global geography of autonomous institutionality.”38 This position valorizes differential infrastructures—beginning with difference as our thesis—as it also places a limit on the institutional alliances we make. A global geography of autonomous institutionality is a first iteration of what DH and CUS might accomplish together if difference and refusal are coarticulated on the infrastructural level.

To conclude, coarticulating Raley’s work with tactical iterations of CUS addresses three political needs. First, it offers a structure that seriously thinks beyond our academic-corporate situation. Second, it better grounds egalitarian visions of the university’s future. Third, it assists in conceptualizing common organizational models that would better oppose institutional and disciplinary inequities. The final challenge that the DH/CUS pairing forwards is thus a precarious challenge: how do we mobilize our global geography of autonomous institutionality toward an equitable distribution of resources for all?

Notes

1. In “Digital Humanities for the Next Five Minutes,” Rita Raley draws on a broad body of scholarship to describe how the contemporary university has succumbed to explicitly neoliberal objectives. Relying on Shelia Slaughter and Gary Rhoades’s work in particular, Raley argues that “Knowledge production has been administratively captured, as is evinced by patent deals, copyright disputes, measurable impact, pay-to-publish schemes, and corporate sponsorship of facilities and research processes alike,” 33. This is what she terms our academic-corporate milieu.

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2. Earhart, Traces of the Old, 121–23; and Edu-factory Collective, Toward a Global Autonomous University, 2.

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3. Shaviro, “Scarcity and Abundance.”

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4. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 170.

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5. Modern Language Association, “Preliminary Report on the MLA Job Information List.”

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6. Cordell, “Humorless Man.”

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7. Gold, “Digital Humanities Moment,” ix.

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8. Kirschenbaum, “Digital Humanities As/Is a Tactical Term,” 415.

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9. Kirschenbaum, “Digital Humanities,” 415–16.

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10. Kirschenbaum argues that DH is a populist term because it is self-identified and self-perpetuated “through algorithmic structures of contemporary social media,” particularly Twitter. This has led to the formation of journals (DHQ) and infrastructures (ADHO), but it does not fundamentally challenge the economic situation on which DH capitalizes.

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11. Part 2 of Newfield’s book, “Inventing PC: The War on Equality,” charts a robust history of racialized exclusions in law and university policy that prefigures his consideration of finance within university structures.

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12. Monroe, et al. interviewed eighty women faculty at UC Irvine between 2002 and 2006 and found that, “In part, discrimination occurs through a process of gender devaluation, whereby the status and power of an authoritative position is downplayed when that position is held by a woman. The UCI women find legal mechanisms and overt, direct political action of limited utility. As a result, they increasingly turn to more understated forms of incremental collective action, revealing an adaptive response to discrimination and a keen sense of the power dynamics within the university,” 216. The narrative that the authors provide demonstrates that women do not feel the institution respects their needs, especially leading up to evaluation.

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13. See Edu-factory Collective, Toward a Global Autonomous University.

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14. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 171.

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15. Shaviro, “Scarcity and Abundance.”

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16. Williams, “Deconstructing Academe.”

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17. Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, 272–74.

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18. Barnett, “The Brave Side,” 76.

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19. Bailey et al. “#transformDH, Growing Up,” 76.

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20. Kim and Stommel, “Introduction.”

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21. Risam, “Navigating the Global Digital Humanities,” 359.

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22. Risam, “Navigating the Global Digital Humanities,” 362.

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23. Risam, “Stewarding Place.”

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24. Caffentzis and Federici, “Notes on the Edu-factory,” 129.

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25. Caffentzis and Federici, “Notes,” 129.

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26. Caffentzis and Federici, “Notes,” 129.

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27. Liu, “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity.”

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28. Liu, “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity.”

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29. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 126.

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30. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 126.

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31. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 127.

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32. Liu, “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity.”

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33. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 177.

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34. Raley, “Digital Humanities for the Next Five Minutes,” 35.

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35. Raley, “Digital Humanities for the Next Five Minutes,” 35.

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36. Edu-factory Collective, Toward a Global Autonomous University, 11.

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37. Edu-factory Collective, Toward a Global Autonomous University, 11.

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38. Edu-factory Collective, Toward a Global Autonomous University, 11.

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