[tt] CHE: Humanities Publishing at the MLA: Digital and Posthuman

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Humanities Publishing at the MLA: Digital and Posthuman
The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i18/18a01401.htm
From the issue dated January 11, 2008
HOT TYPE

By JENNIFER HOWARD

"How many of you want your first book to be electronic?" asked W.J.T. 
Mitchell, longtime editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, after a panel 
on "Professionalization in a Digital Age" at the Modern Language 
Association's annual convention in Chicago.

Mr. Mitchell, a professor of English and art history at the University of 
Chicago, directed the question at an audience largely made up of graduate 
students. Nobody put up a hand. While that group has good reason to be 
drawn to digital publishing, it also has reason to be wary, at least until 
tenure committees treat e-scholarship as seriously as they do print 
monographs and journal articles.

The members of the audience had just heard N. Katherine Hayles, a 
professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, tell 
them that "the future is yours to invent." They had been invited by 
Jennifer Crewe, associate director and editorial director of Columbia 
University Press, to join in "Rethinking the First Book." (Ms. Crewe 
subtitled her talk "Dissertations as Bits and Bytes.")

As editor of Critical Inquiry for three decades, Mr. Mitchell has been 
party to more than a few theoretical revolutions. At the MLA, however, he 
sounded downright conservative about the digital frontier in publishing 
and pedagogy.

"The students in my classroom complain about being too wired," he told his 
listeners. "What is it the digital is supposed to be triumphing over?"

We must "criticize, analyze, historicize, and above all resist the easy 
routines that technology offers," he argued. He used a Johnny 
Mnemonic-like term to argue that technology amounts to nothing without 
biological entities (us) to use it: "At the end of the day, wetware 
rules."

"What can we say back to technology?" he asked. "Saying that we are 
posthuman has been a good polemical start" — implying that the rhetoric 
was useful but not enough.

***

That comment invoked one of the MLA's unofficial themes of the meeting: 
posthumanism. The idea is not new. Almost a decade ago, for instance, Ms. 
Hayles published an influential book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual 
Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago 
Press, 1999).

But the notion has gotten a boost lately. One example: The University of 
Minnesota Press just inaugurated a series on posthumanism edited by Cary 
Wolfe, a professor of English at Rice University. First out in the series 
is a reissue of Michel Serres's The Parasite.

As the Minnesota press Web site describes it, the book "uses fable to 
explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the 
host body. Among Serres's arguments is that by being pests, minor groups 
can become major players in public dialogue — creating diversity and 
complexity vital to human life and thought."

Other books in the series so far include The Poetics of DNA, by Judith 
Roof, a professor of English and film studies at Michigan State 
University, which "reveals the ideological effects of DNA metaphors and 
stories," and When Species Meet, by Donna J. Haraway, a professor in the 
history-of-consciousness program at the University of California at Santa 
Cruz.

***

At a party thrown by Critical Inquiry, the University of Chicago Press, 
and Chicago's Division of the Humanities, Mr. Wolfe tried to distill 
posthumanist thought for a reporter. If she understood him correctly — the 
jazz stylings of Yoko Noge's Jazz Me Blues combo made conversation a tad 
difficult — the general idea is that posthumanism displaces the 
Renaissance-humanist idea of man (or wetware, in Mr. Mitchell's parlance) 
as the proper object of study. It sets us into context alongside other, 
nonhuman entities as well as our own technologies.

The Minnesota press describes the series this way: "Posthumanities 
investigates the many ways that the human has been entangled in complex 
relations with animals, the environment, and technology for which the 
theoretical and ethical understandings of humanism are no longer 
adequate."

The series got a nice, extra-academic boost recently when the cyberpunk 
writer Bruce Sterling posted about it over at Beyond the Beyond, his Wired 
magazine blog. Mr. Sterling welcomed the series, although he did point out 
that "the posthuman is quite an old sci-fi concept now." One of his 
readers commented that "it's a regular academic industry already. Those 
cult-studs are old news."

The Critical Inquiry party, incidentally, was supposed to be in honor of 
the venerable deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller but turned out to be a 
surprise bash for Mr. Mitchell, organized to mark his 30 years as the 
journal's editor. Mr. Mitchell was presented with a special issue of his 
own journal, and he and Mr. Miller traded jokes about which of them could 
really claim to be a parasite.

Mr. Miller's essay in the special issue, "What Do Stories About Pictures 
Want?," riffs off Mr. Mitchell's well-known book What Do Pictures Want? 
The Lives and Loves of Images (University of Chicago Press, 2005). The 
essay contains a line that humanists and posthumanists both might 
appreciate: "All criticism has that slightly sinister motive of putting 
the text or painting and its maker in their place."