PART II ][ Blog Posts

Has Critical Theory Run Out of Time for Data-Driven Scholarship?

GARY HALL

Certainly, something that is particularly noticeable about many instances of this turn to data-driven scholarship—especially after decades when the humanities have been heavily marked by a variety of critical theories (Marxist, psychoanalytic, postcolonialist, post-Marxist)—is just how difficult they find it to understand computing and the digital as much more than tools, techniques, and resources and thus how naive and lacking in meaningful critique they often are (Liu; Higgen). Of course, this (at times explicit) repudiation of criticality could be viewed as part of what makes certain aspects of the digital humanities so intriguing at the moment. From this perspective, exponents of the computational turn are precisely not making what I have elsewhere characterized as the antipolitical gesture of conforming to accepted (and often moralistic) conceptions of politics that have been decided in advance, including those that see it only in terms of power, ideology, race, gender, class, sexuality, ecology, affect, and so forth (Hall, Digitize). Refusing to “go through the motions of a critical avant-garde,” to borrow the words of Bruno Latour, they are responding to what is perceived as a fundamentally new cultural situation and the challenge it represents to our traditional methods of studying culture by avoiding such conventional gestures and experimenting with the development of fresh methods and approaches for the humanities instead.¹

In a series of posts on his Found History blog, Tom Scheinfeldt, managing director at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, positions such scholarship very much in terms of a shift from a concern with theory and ideology to a concern with methodology:

In this respect there may well be a degree of “relief in having escaped the culture wars of the 1980s”—for those in the United States especially—as a result of this move “into the space of methodological work” (Higgen) and what Scheinfeldt reportedly dubs “the post-theoretical age” (cited in Cohen, “Digital Keys”). The problem is, though, without such reflexive critical thinking and theories many of those whose work forms part of this computational turn find it difficult to articulate exactly what the point of what they are doing is, as Scheinfeldt readily acknowledges (“Where’s the Beef?”).

Witness one of the projects I mentioned earlier: the attempt by Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs to text mine all the books published in English in the Victorian age (or at least those digitized by Google).² Among other things, this allows Cohen and Gibbs to show that use of the word “revolution” in book titles of the period spiked around “the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848” (Cohen, “Searching”). But what argument is it that they are trying to make with this? How exactly is the number of times a word does or does not occur significant? What is it we are able to learn as a result of this use of computational power on their part that we didn’t know already and couldn’t have discovered without it (Scheinfeldt, “Where’s the Beef”)?

Elsewhere, in an explicit response to Cohen and Gibbs’s project, Scheinfeldt suggests that the problem of theory, or the lack of it, may actually be a matter of scale and timing:

Yet notice how theory is again being marginalized in favour of an emphasis on STEM subjects and the adoption of expectations and approaches associated with mathematicians and astronomers in particular.

This is not to deny the importance of experimenting with the new kinds of knowledge, tools, methods, materials, and modes of working and thinking that digital media technologies create and make possible, including those drawn from computer science, in order to bring new forms of Foucauldian dispositifs, or what Bernard Stiegler calls hypomnemata (i.e., mnemonics, what Plato referred to as pharmaka, both poisons and cures), or what I am trying to think in terms of media gifts into play.³ And I would potentially include in this process of experimentation techniques and methodologies drawn from computer science and other related fields such as information visualization, data mining, and so forth. Yes, of course, it is quite possible that as Daniel W. Stowell, director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project at the Illinois Historic Preservation Society puts it, in the future “people will use this data in ways we can’t even imagine yet,” both singularly and collaboratively (cited in Cohen, “Digital Keys”). Still, there is something intriguing about the way in which many defenders of the turn toward computational tools and methods in the humanities evoke a sense of time in relation to theory.

Take the argument—one I have heard put forward at a number of different events now—that critical and self-reflexive theoretical questions about the use of digital tools and data-led methodologies should be deferred for the time being, lest they have the effect of strangling at birth what could turn out to be a very different form of humanities research before it has had a chance to properly develop and take shape. Viewed in isolation, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to decide whether this particular form of “limitless” postponement (Deleuze, 5) is serving as an alibi for a naive and rather superficial form of scholarship (Meeks) or whether it is indeed acting as a responsible, political or ethical opening to the (heterogeneity and incalculability of the) future, including the future of the humanities. After all, the suggestion is that now is not the right time to be making any such decision or judgment, since we cannot yet know how humanists will eventually come to use these tools and data and thus what data-driven scholarship may or may not turn out to be capable of critically, politically, theoretically.

This argument would be more convincing as a responsible political or ethical call to leave the question of the use of digital tools and data-led methodologies in the humanities open if it were the only sense in which time was evoked in relation to theory in this context. Significantly, it is not. As we have seen, advocates for the computational turn do so in a number of other and often competing senses, too. These include the following:

All of this gives a very different inflection to the view of theoretical critique as being at best inappropriate and at worst harmful to data-driven scholarship. Even a brief glance at the history of theory’s reception in the English-speaking world is sometimes enough to reveal that those who announce its time has not yet come, or is already over, that theory is in decline or even dead and that we now live in a posttheoretical world, are more often than not endeavoring to keep it at a temporal distance. Positioning their own work as being either pre- or posttheory in this way in effect gives them permission to continue with their preferred techniques and methodologies for studying culture relatively uncontested (rather than having to ask rigorous, critical and self-reflexive questions about their practices and their justifications for them). Placed in this wider context, far from helping to keep the question concerning the use of digital tools and data-led methodologies in the humanities open (or having anything particularly interesting to say about theory), the rejection of critical-theoretical ideas as untimely can be seen as both moralizing and conservative.

In saying this I am reiterating an argument initially made by Wendy Brown in the sphere of political theory. Yet can a similar case not be made with regard to the computational turn in the humanities to the effect that the “rebuff of critical theory as untimely provides the core matter for the affirmative case for it”?⁴ Theory is vital from this point of view, not for conforming to accepted conceptions of political critique that see it primarily in terms of power, ideology, race, gender, class, sexuality, ecology, affect, and so forth or for sustaining conventional methods of studying culture that may no longer be appropriate to the networked nature of twenty-first century postindustrial society. Theory is vital “to contest the very sense of time invoked to declare critique untimely” (Brown, 4).