Destaques

Rui Alexandre Grácio [2024]

«One response to this has been a call for digital humanities to be more responsive to cultural critique and critical theory (Berry 2012, 2013; Liu 2012a, 2012b, 33). This calls for wider social, cultural, political, and economic questions raised by digital technology to become part of critique in the digital humanities. This also means developing a program of criticism with respect to the computational in parallel with the digital transformations of the humanities and social science, and particularly its manifestation in digital capitalism, through what is called critical digital humanities (Berry 2013; Raley 2014, 35; Berry and Fagerjord 2017; but see also Dobson 2019). 7 This includes not just the technology itself but also the way in which the digital can be used to import neoliberal labor practices, academic restructuring, and grant-capture culture, particularly through digital humanities units that are not reflexive about their own situation.» p. 126

«In contrast, critical digital humanities argues that future directions for the digital humanities must be collegial, critically oriented, and more reflexive of the way in which computation is no longer merely a tool for thought, but also a disruptive infrastructure, medium, and milieu. Digital technology is therefore a medium of change and carries social change along with it, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. 9 It is not merely a neutral instrument but also constitutes an entire apparatus and political economy with its own endogenous interests and value-structures and which cannot just be naively “applied” to the humanities.
This matters because the application of computation in the arts and humanities is not merely a neutral act of switching to a new medium, say from paper to digital. The digital and computation carry with them an imposed selectivity on how knowledge is transferred into data and in many cases the communicative capacities of digital networks can and do distort the data transmitted or stored. In addition, computation forms a political economic network which forms real material interests.» pp. 126-127.

«While digital humanists have been exemplary in thinking critically about issues such as inherited, and sometimes contested, classifications, absences, encoding, and metadata when archives are digitalized, they have paid less attention to the medium-specific problematics or political economy of an inherent instrumentality in computation. That is, computation has a politics, partly due to its historical formation but also due to its tendency to impose metaphysical or formalist thinking on projects and programmers which may consequently be transmitted onto digital humanities work. 10 This can lead to a valorization of the mathematization of thought whereby formalization of knowledge through computation is seen as not just one approach to thinking but the exemplary one, often one that is misplaced (see Da 2019 for a related critique of using statistics). This is an idea shared by the logical positivists that “there was a certain rock bottom of knowledge … which was indubitable. Every other kind of knowledge was supposed to be firmly supported by this basis and therefore likewise decidable with certainty” (Carnap 1967, 57). Mathematization tends towards formalization and rationalization, which can become an ideology that reduces the digital to instrumental rationality. Computation thought of as a mathematical or logical force comes to be seen as an independent participant in human social relations, it is given “life” fixed by its own nature and a power to shape social life.» p. 127

«To human eyes it can seem as if computation is acting for itself and out of its own inner necessities, but in actuality it is subsumed to the needs of capitalism, not a form of mystified computational unfolding. Most notably computation, under conditions of capitalism, tends to develop the technical ability to separate control from execution (Braverman 1974, 159; Deleuze 1992).
This results in a process of generalized proletarianization of human thought and related social pathologies such as an individual’s alienation from social life. This can lead to a sense of powerlessness and loss of meaning as the experience of social life mediated through computation makes it appear as fragmented and does not fit into a meaningful whole. In capitalism, computation tends to contribute to creating structural obstacles, such as persuasive interfaces and obfuscation of underlying computational processes, affecting an individual’s capacity to understand the world and to see themselves as agents who can shape and change that world.» p. 127

«In contrast, critical digital humanities can be understood as a research program guided by a common goal of human emancipation, carried out through reflexive interdisciplinary work that traditional scholarship has failed to address. It identifies the search for foundations and origins, which are current in digital humanities and computationalism, as not only problematic from a theoretical point of view but also politically suspect, tending towards reactionary politics (see Golumbia 2009). 12 This mania for foundations is built on the idealist assumption that everything can be reduced to mind.» p. 128

«One of the paradoxes of computationalism is the way in which it is simultaneously understood as a logical foundationalism with a demonstrative method combined with a developmental or processual explanation. 15 The foundationalism tends towards an invariant conception of entities and relations frozen at the time of their computational fixation.» p. 128

«In contrast, a critical digital humanities argues that computation and digital theorizing should and must be situated within a historical constellation to understand that it presents a distorted view of thought and experience, revealing the hidden structures of computational ideology. 18 By drawing on critical theory, critical digital humanities has the only prescription that one must have insight into one’s own responsibility. Knowledge is seen as a historical and material phenomenon. That is, that the dominant mode of thought increasingly expressed through computationalism disguises partisan interest, indeed material factors are the repressed factor. Materialism, unlike idealism, always understands thinking to be the thinking of a particular people within a particular period of time. Idealism presupposes a subject who is independent of time able to discern abstractions, theories, and ideas by which the knowledge of an underlying structure is obtained. But that knowledge and structure belong to a particular historical situation. Indeed, materialism challenges the claim for the autonomy of thought and instead focuses on the concrete conditions under which humans live and in which too often their lives become stunted. These computational forms of life under capitalism should be criticized where it is not only different from what it could be but also different from what it should be.» p. 129

«This would encourage digital humanities not just to “build things” but to take them apart and question the values that are embedded in the software—developing critical software to test its ideas and challenge its assumptions. This would call on digital humanities to turn its hermeneutic skills on the very software and algorithms that make up these systems. Critical digital humanities should advocate an ideology critique that challenges the knowledge industry, including the universities, museums, galleries, and arts, to uncover and reveal the hidden factors such as the struggle, social conflicts, and divisions in society. Often it is claimed that the digital creates a transparency through its mediating lens which “shows” or “reveals” hidden patterns or structures; however, as much as the digital may reveal it only does so partially, simultaneously hiding other aspects from view.

Critical digital humanities therefore aims to map and critique the use of the digital but is also attentive to questions of power, domination, myth, and exploitation.» p. 129

«Computation is not just a technical matter, it is also a social, economic, and historical phenomenon and can be traced and periodized through this historicization. This is important because the hegemony of computational concepts and methods may lead to new forms of control, myth, and the privileging of computational rationality. As such, critical digital humanities should not only map these challenges but also propose new ways of reconfiguring research, teaching, and knowledge representation to safeguard critical and rational thought in a digital age. Digital humanities along with other cognate disciplines must remain attentive to moments in culture where critical thinking and the ability to distinguish between concept and object become weakened.» p. 130

«There is a clear need to strengthen critical reflexivity in the digital humanities, and I want to expand a little on this notion. Here there is only space to provide pointers towards a set of practices and ways of thinking rather than a comprehensive blueprint. Nonetheless, I want to suggest that a way of critiquing the, sometimes, instrumental tendencies within the digital humanities could be a greater focus on the socio-technical aspects of the technologies. […] Digital humanities can and should examine how processes of automation in knowledge production and manipulation are often a means of exploiting labor, together with a critique of its own organizational practices. […] It should aim to understand how computation is not just a technical choice of instrumentation, but carries with it ideological assumptions and structures that may subtly distort the outcome of a particular digital project, such as about class, gender, or race (Eubanks 2018; Bordalejo and Risam 2019; Chun 2021). This would enable it to challenge the idea that digital technologies offer a panacea for liberal thought and freedom and show how they are equally able to undermine the human capacity for critical reflexivity and reason.» p. 131

«This requires enabling a new spirit of criticality and a rethinking of what it means to be human within a computational milieu—especially in terms of nurturing and encouraging critical reason. In other words, there is an urgent need to reconfigure quantification, formalism, and instrumental rational processes away from domination and control, towards reflexivity, critique, and democratic practices. As Thompson argues, “the task of articulating new forms of ethical life—that is, new shapes of social reality (relations, processes and purposes)—is the fundamental task of a critical theory” (2022, 19). This would be to develop a critical reflexive humanism which grants digital humanities some measure of autonomy from quantitative and computational approaches.» p. 131