[SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

[Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan]

Hi All,

After Matthew threw in his two bits tom Tom's comments, I feel compelled 
to add something too. Tom wrote:
>
>     . . .  I’m trained in history, rather than English or media
>     studies. There’s a difference between the kind of arguments that
>     are allowed in the two fields, specifically with respect to
>     evidence and claims about causation. Scholarship in English tends
>     to be more self-consciously performative, and more concerned with
>     joining up apparently unconnected things in a provocative or
>     original way. I’m reminded of a workshop at Penn where Rob Kohler
>     asked a visiting English professor “How would you know if an
>     argument of this kind had gone off the rails and fallen off the
>     cliff?” His suggestion was that you couldn’t, that the aesthetic
>     standards at work meant that almost any connection of conclusion
>     to evidence would be equally valid.
>
I'd put it a little differently, by saying that a stricter code of what 
can be considered causality governs much (though not all) academic 
historiography. The world is full of interrelations that are quite 
important but slip through the grid of standard academic historiography, 
which often favors certain kinds of narrative causality, and in 
anglophone contexts especially, certain kinds of intentionality or human 
agency, and so on. So I'd agree with Tom that it's about different 
notions of evidence and causation. However, because academic 
historiographic it's so bound up with matching a certain set of 
professional codes, it's not actually about "history" in the very first 
instance, but rather about shared standards that we can work around to 
"write history." In this regard, I think that sometimes adjacent fields 
-- sociology, media studies, literary studies, philosophy, even 
literature -- can in certain instances get closer to the messy 
interrelations that "make history" or "are history," even though they 
are not the stuff of "historiography" in its disciplinary, academic 
iteration.

To take an example relevant to the UNIX case: I did an oral history with 
an engineer who worked at Bell Labs from the 1950s through the 1970s, 
and he told me that working there was great, it was like a sleepover 
camp, they frequently worked all night and over the weekends. Then, he 
claimed, it all changed in the 1970s when they started "hiring womens 
and foreigners." In his account, the social life (I think Tom called it 
a "bromance" broke down. Not too long after, UNIX started becoming a big 
deal in the Labs. What does this mean? How do we map these 
interrelatedness of gender, race, and communication engineering that is 
suggested here? It's damn hard. Folks on this list such as Light, 
Medina, and Ensmenger have helped us start mapping out those relations 
historiographically. And yet, so much there will forever escape rigorous 
historiographic method. Does that mean those relations cannot be 
considered? Or that they cannot be considered empirically? Not at all, 
it seems to me.   It is probably helpful that some folks from English or 
media studies can investigate these interrelations without worrying 
about the models of causality that govern mainstream disciplinary 
approaches to History. That's why so many of the major historiographic 
innovations don't originate in academic history, but instead migrate 
from other fields.

In that regard, and like J. Abbate, I think the McPherson piece is a 
wonderful provocation, an occasion to think further, and think 
historiographically, about problems are difficult to think about with 
established historiographic methods. (That's also why I like this list 
so much --- its grab-bag methodological character!).

Best,
Bernard


>
>
> I don't this is an especially helpful anecdote, other than perhaps a 
> very low-resolution snapshot of the general embrace of indeterminacy 
> that characterizes much of the academic humanities. By contrast, and 
> given that my scholarly training is in English literature and that my 
> professional activities take the form of "media studies" (including 
> what we term book history, itself a form of media studies in my view), 
> I feel very comfortable in asserting the following:
>
> English professors (and media studies scholars) are interested in 
> being right in so far as what reasonable people would understand 
> getting their facts straight to mean.
>
> English professors and media studies scholars are interested in 
> primary sources and the archival record.
>
> English professors and media studies scholars do not think anything 
> goes, that one point of view is just as good as any other, or that 
> it's all just, like, your opinion anyway, man.
>
> I do think, as Tom, notes, that we are generally *more* interested in 
> close reading and the ambiguities and sensitivities of language as 
> evidence of historical phenomena, and more willing to place pressure 
> on seeming contradictions or ambiguities which manifest at a 
> linguistic level as evidence of same; and that we are generally more 
> sympathetic to social constructivist (as opposed to techno 
> determinist) arguments. These are huge sweeping statements of course, 
> and my own intent is less to throw down the gauntlet with any single 
> one of them than to offer a general corrective to the notion that the 
> difference between media or cultural or literary studies on the one 
> hand, and the work of an historian on the other is that the one is 
> concerned with getting it right and the others just want to put on a 
> good show.
>
> I don't think Tom really thinks that either, btw, but I have been a 
> little concerned to see it taken up as an acceptable explanation for 
> whatever shortcomings people perceive to be at work in the essay that 
> kicked off the discussion. Disciplinary differences are very real to 
> be sure, but they can't be reduced to anecdote and caricature.
>
> Best, Matt
>
>
> -- 
> Matthew Kirschenbaum
> Associate Professor of English
> Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the 
> Humanities (MITH)
> University of Maryland
> http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter
>
>
>
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-- 
Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
Institut für Kulturwissenschaft
Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

www.bernardg.com

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