[SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

Fri Aug 21 13:40:38 PDT 2015

Having finally read Tara McPherson's piece (Why Are the Digital Humanities
So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation) in the wake of
reading this very interesting listserv thread I'm left with a couple of
reactions // questions.

First, I found much of Thomas Haigh's observations helpful.  Despite the
fact that there are interesting parallels between mid-20th century American
segregation and a developing modularity in computer programming there
doesn't seem to be much historical evidence that these practices "infected"
one another.

Second, I also found Matthew Kirschenbaum's email helpful.  It may be true
that we can't find much evidence of racism in UNIX.  But that isn't really
ultimately what the essay is about.   Pace Haigh's claim that it's a
polemic I read it more as an invitation to contextualize the study of
institutions within the larger society in which they are situated.  As
McPherson puts it:

*We must develop common languages that link the study of code and culture.
We must historicize and politicize code studies. And, because digital media
were born as much of the civil rights era as of the cold war era (and of
course these eras are one and the same), our investigations must
incorporate race from the outset, understanding and theorizing its function
as a ghost in the digital machine. This does not mean that we should simply
add race to our analysis in a modular way, neatly tacking it on or building
digital archives of racial material, but that we must understand and
theorize the deep imbrications of race and digital technology even when our
objects of analysis (say UNIX or search engines) seem not to be about race
at all.*

This doesn't necessarily mean that the triptych of race, class and sex can
explain everything.  But it does mean that they are important categories of
analysis and we shouldn't dismiss them in the study of code.  If we take
umbrage at that invitation (as some of us have) it's worth recalling
McPherson's reference to "patterned isolation" in the university (a term
that I believe Veysey coined in his classic text The Emergence of the
American University) and that we can't really explain its emergence
comprehensively without also referencing the triptych of race, class, and
gender politics that grew the university in the 20th century.  Contrast for
example Veysey's study of the university against Levine's The Opening of
the American Mind and the lesson becomes clear: Veysey's institutional
history is a classic.  But Levine's is a worthy compliment in that it shows
how curricular developments weren't just driven by internal bureaucracies
or by disciplinary beliefs but were also influenced by the fact that the
university began to cater to a much more diverse public.  So in the same
way Levine enriched the study of the university by looking at it through
the lens of race, class and sex, we can potentially do the same thing when
we write histories about the development of code.  That doesn't mean that
we can always give an affirmative answer to a question like "Is ____
racist?"  But the question is worth posing nonetheless.

Third, I'm left with a question.  Is it really true that an essay like
McPherson's is impractical to teach to engineers as Haigh and Ceruzzi seem
to feel?  I would think that like say Winner's essay "Do Artifacts Have
Politics?" it poses an important set of questions that are worth raising if
we want to understand the relationship between politics and code.   To that
end I'd be interested in knowing how Kirschenbaum (and others) teach this
essay in the classroom.  What questions do they pose to the class?  And how
have engineering majors responded to it?

Sincerely,

Luke Fernandez

lfernandez.org

On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 1:59 PM, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks Bernard,
>
> Looks like the discussion is moving in a productive discussion.
>
> Matt, I didn't mean to lead a charge of virtuous historians against the
> infidels of English. Why, some of my best friends are English professors.
> The argument I was making was basically one about the social construction
> of scholarly knowledge, which is something you'll find STS scholars and
> historians of science and technology are often quite familiar with. I was
> struck that some on the list found the paper in question unequivocally
> terrible, whereas others thought it to be good enough to assign in class
> and thus make it something students might pattern their own narratives
> after.
>
> I do believe that these judgments reflect the aesthetic preferences of
> different disciplinary communities. From a broadly Latourian perspective,
> we are all in the business of producing texts in which claims and evidence
> are strung together. We learn how to do this as grad students and junior
> faculty, and only those who can do it very well become tenured professors.
> These aesthetic preferences for one or another kind of narrative become
> thoroughly internalized. Papers that don't follow the rules won't get
> published and people who don't follow the rules won't get hired.
>
> But the rules for are different in different disciplines and
> sub-disciplines. That's a feature, not a bug as otherwise we wouldn't need
> more that one discipline. In this case the games are like American Football
> and Rugby. There are some familial resemblances, but moves that would win
> points in one context would be called as fouls in another. Of course there
> are a range of permitted styles within communities, and Matt himself writes
> with admirable cogency and clarity even from my own viewpoint.
>
> Abundant evidence suggests that McPherson is doing a fine job when her
> text is evaluated by members of her own disciplinary communities. She works
> at a much better university than me, her chapter made it into the DH
> volume, it has been assigned for courses, etc. So, in all probability, was
> the professor who gave the talk at Penn long ago. According to the
> standards of other communities their arguments had gone off the rails. To
> use Kuhn's term, the standards for truth and excellence are
> incommensurable. A paper that could be published in Social Text would not
> be publishable in Technology and Culture, or vice versa. It's not a case of
> caring or not caring about getting things right or being truthful, but the
> most fundamental idea of STS is that standards for truth and proof are
> socially constructed and differ between communities and traditions. If we
> believe that's true of Unix and the technical communities we study then we
> need to eat our own dog food and admit that it's true in our own
> disciplines and of own work.
>
> This is something I have become very aware of with my personal shifts of
> disciplinary context from computer science to history/STS to information
> studies. While my personal preferences are fairly clear, spending my life
> in a school where few of my colleagues share my assumptions about what a
> paper should look like, what counts as evidence, etc. has made me much more
> aware of the parochial nature of my own preferred traditions. McPherson
> would doubtless see the kind of history I enjoy reading and try to write as
> plodding, woefully under theorized, blind to its own class and gender
> privilege, etc. and by her own standards she'd be quite right. One of the
> nice things about SIGCIS is that we bring a diversity of scholarly
> traditions together, in fact a broader range than our parent society SHOT.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Tom
>
> On Aug 20, 2015, at 4:20 PM, 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
>
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