Today, we will start by reviewing the expectations and procedure for submitting your DH Report drafts. Please be sure to have the draft of your report posted before class on Thursday. These are short reports, so get your draft to a point of closure so we can start to work on the next stages. When ready, use this link to upload a doc, docx, rtf, or pdf file.
Next, we will talk about our readings. We will start with
Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. There are some open-ended questions below, but we will try to trace the argument. Here is my take:
Starts with historical gesture to Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche through Ricoeur using hermenutics. Not a negative; rather a healthy way of getting beyond the obvious.
But hermeneutics never took off, and has been replaced by poststructuralist approaches, which paradoxically focus on structure, surface, and analytic gynmastics (my term).
But suspicion, and then critique, developed more negative approaches, especially critique.
In fact, critique has become so prevalent that it dominates scholarship: "Critique is
contagious and charismatic, drawing everything around it into its field of force, marking the
boundaries of what counts as serious thought. For many scholars in the humanities, it is not just
one good thing but the only conceivable thing"
This has had concerning consequences:
- It is negative and adversarial
- It is secondary. This drives consumption over production (my casting)--looking backward vs speculation
- It is intellectual--opaque (my term)
- It is linked with opposition, but intellectualizes rather than enacts disruption.
- It does not tolerate alternative intellectual approaches
After listing all of these problems (without irony), Felski sketches out some alternatives: including affect and ethos. These possibilities lead to a desire to resuscitate suspicious hermeneutics and other variants with even more affirmative connotations.
My take: Yes, and. Yes: critique and adversarial intellectual work do damage and create massive blind spots. And: part of the problem may be the materials of academic thought themselves--mostly words.
Consider performance and an alternative: First, let's take the performative nature of language. Thank you performs as it declares. Firemen shape our identities. As we know, we are interpellated (see Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, etc.) If this is so, what follows is prose-based academic work shapes us.
Let's also take the performance for its yes-and dynamics (here is a bonus reading if interested) and imagine layering materials other than words together.
To finish our thinking, we will take a look at two of our improv videos from last time and think about affect and non-verbal materials.
And here are some more open-ended question about Felski's piece:
- What do you think of when you hear the word, critique?
- Who would use a term like hermeneutics in the first place?
- Can you still avoid the obvious or self-evident without being critical?
- Does Felski offer a straw construction of poststructuralism?
- The role of critique is not to castigate, but to complicate, not to engage in ideas’ destruction but to expose their cultural construction -- sounds good, right?
- What are some other ways of arguing, reading, thinking?
- How do ethos and affect shape our reading?
- How does this all connect with the digital?
Finally, here are some questions about our other two readings:
Where's the Beef?
- What's the infatuation with argument?
- What are the humanities all about?
- What are the benefits of tool building?
- How does Sheinfeldt's tool building square with Drucker's concerns of using the tools of others?
Why is DH Nice?
- What about the method vs theory proposition?
- Is DH nice?
- Should it be?
Once we have completed our discussion, you can work in your groups for the remainder of class. Be sure to submit your draft essay before Thursday.