differences_LP

Differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies


 * What counts as an argument?**

critical analysis of how gender/difference operates within culture

should engage with "theories of difference" and "politics of diversity" Also ethnography and literary criticism
 * How supported?**

Often special issues --> contribution to the special issue theme Theoretical contribution appears to be more significant than empirical
 * Contribution?**

Designing for Difference

Considering the role of cultural theory in the digital humanities (and various other new disciplines), McPherson argues that digital technologies may be incommensurable with critical theory concerned with difference. She goes on to consider the types of designs concerns needed to bring difference to the fore, and walks through these considerations in articulating the designs of Vectors and Scalar.

[|Tara McPherson] Abstract This piece considers some recent variations on the debate around the role of cultural theory within the digital humanities, code studies, and platform studies in order to argue for a theoretically explicit form of digital praxis within the digital humanities. It takes seriously Gary Hall’s recent claim that the very goals of critical theory and of quantitative or computational analysis may in fact be incommensurable. The author argues that there is something particular to the very forms of digital culture that encourage a separation of technological investigation from cultural contexts, a portioning off that also plays out in the increasing specialization of academic fields and even in the formation of many modes of identity politics. We need conceptual models for the digital humanities and for digital media studies that integrate theory and practice as well as technology and culture. Feminist theory has much to offer in this regard. As such, the author asks what it might mean to design—from their very conception—digital tools and applications that emerge from the concerns of cultural theory and, in particular, from a feminist concern for difference. Put differently, this essay poses this question: can software be feminist? In answering that question, McPherson turns to the scholarship of Anne Balsamo, Karen Barad, and others to examine two digital media projects that she has been involved in, the journal Vectors and the publishing platform Scalar.

The Cybernetic Hypothesis Galloway offers a reading of how cybernetic histories are reshaping academic labor, particularly in the digital humanities. He begins by outlining the cybernetic assumptions built into digital technology and humanistic research and goes on to examine its impacts on intellectual work. [|Alexander R. Galloway] Abstract Taking inspiration from Tiqqun’s 2001 text “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” this essay examines the relationship between digital technology and scholarly research methods. A definition of the cybernetic hypothesis is presented by way of a series of historical investigations into the work of Lewis Richardson, Warren Weaver, John von Neumann, and Paul Otlet. Cybernetics is defined thus in terms of a broad set of assumptions and techniques influencing society and culture at large. These assumptions and techniques include an epistemology rooted in arrays or systems containing discrete entities, the organization of entities into systems, and the regularization of difference or asymmetry within the system overall. After having presented this view of cybernetics, the author examines the challenges and problems such a paradigm presents to scholarly research methods including contemporary developments in the digital humanities. These challenges and problems are grouped into two sets of terms: hegemony, recapitulation, and symmetry; and ideology, deskilling, and proletarianization. What kind of intellectual work is possible after the rise of digital media? Examining some aspects of contemporary technology and critical theory, this essay serves both as a meditation on the contemporary cybernetic world and as a proposal for what ought to be done about it.

The Woman on the Other Side of the Wall: Archiving the Otherwise in Postcolonial Digital Archives [|Elizabeth A. Povinelli] Abstract This article probes a set of problems in the theory and practice of the postcolonial archive that has emerged as the author and her Indigenous and non-Indigenous colleagues have struggled to create a new media archive in rural northwest Australia. This archive does not as yet exist. If it existed as it is currently conceived, it would organize mixed (augmented) reality media on the basis of social media and operate it on smart phones. The smart phones would contain a small segment of the archive, which would be geotagged so that it could not run unless the phone was proximate to the site to which the information referred. This article argues that if “archive” is the name we give to the power to make and command what took place here or there, in this or that place, and thus what has an authoritative place in the contemporary organization of social life, the postcolonial new media archive cannot be merely a collection of digital artifacts reflecting a different, subjugated history. Instead, the postcolonial archive must directly address the problem of the endurance of the otherwise within—or distinct from—this form of power.

Death of a Discipline [|David Golumbia] Abstract In 2003, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published Death of a Discipline, an exhortation to create “an inclusive comparative literature,” one that “takes the languages of the Southern Hemisphere as active cultural media rather than as objects of cultural study.” To many literary scholars such a development seemed welcome and even likely. Instead, ten years later, an entirely different transformation has taken place via the development of the digital humanities (DH), in which the close study of literature and the languages in which it is embedded have themselves been demoted in favor of “distant reading” and other forms of quantitative and large-scale analyses and whose language politics have regressed rather than progressed from the state Spivak described. DH advertises itself as an unexceptionable application of computational techniques to literary scholarship, yet its advent has accompanied an almost complete reorientation of literary studies as a field—a virtual death of the vision described by Spivak. The advent of DH is quite unlike the ones accompanying the introduction of computers into other disciplines, whose basic precepts have remained largely intact in the face of digitization. DH’s paradoxical use of the adjective “digital” to describe only a fraction of research methods that engage with digital technology creates a tension that must be resolved—either by the DH label being reabsorbed into literary studies or by literary research itself being fundamentally altered, a goal that DH has already in part achieved.

“This Is Not a Copy”: Mechanical Fidelity and the Re-enacting Piano [|Nick Seaver] Abstract The American Piano Company, in the early twentieth century, built a reenacting piano that could automatically play back performances recorded by virtuoso pianists. This article examines the production, in the company lab, of that piano’s fidelity—the terms by which an original and reenacted performance could be said to be the same. Taking fidelity not as an objective measure of sameness but rather as a mediation between machinery and people, the author finds in the discourse around the re-enacting piano echoes of the nineteenth-century scientific “mechanical objectivity” identified by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. The re-enacting piano’s “mechanical fidelity” was developed in the laboratory and advertising copy as a conjunction of objectivity, materiality, and identity. Through a commingling of traits that had formerly been considered either human or mechanical, the re-enacting piano offered a way to imagine human and machine performances as materially interchangeable and potentially identical. Human and mechanical identity are mediated through the details of fidelity, and this article argues that by exploring the production of a fidelity quite unlike the phonographic fidelity that would come to define the word, we can better understand the contingencies of reproducing technologies and the human identities—including our sense of sound—that are shaped in collaboration with them.

In this article, I consider how information infrastructure designers, with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and epistemic commitments, distinguish what counts as information - what Bateson refers to as the "differences that make a difference." Through ethnographic analysis of the community of practitioners building the Semantic Web, I show how diverse epistemic and cultural assumptions become embedded in different places throughout information infrastructures. Star and Griesemer (1989) suggest that, in instances where researchers with heterogeneous commitments effectively collaborate, they produce “boundary objects” – objects flexible enough to hold different meaning for the diverse communities that cooperate around them. Yet, I argue that the process of building information infrastructure involves more than making the infrastructure meaningful in different ways for different groups; it also involves pushing the differences that they bring to their work to the limit - performing a "trick" as one of my interlocutors describes it. Drawing on Drucilla Cornell's articulation of deconstruction as "the philosophy of the limit," I describe how this trick manifests in information infrastructure. I argue that resulting information infrastructure can better be characterized as a "hypertense, hypertext" in the words of Paul Edwards.
 * My abstract**