[SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

[Matthew Kirschenbaum]

I like what Bernard says very much.



On Thursday, August 20, 2015, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan <
bernard.geoghegan at hu-berlin.de> wrote:

> 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
>
>

-- 
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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