Tacit

One thing I wish to observe about the UVa Scholars' Lab's upcoming "Speaking in Code" symposium is this.

A call for diverse participation rings hollow when the lineup of invited speakers is 100% white and cis male. I can think of some things besides "impostor syndrome" that might keep a developer from an underrepresented group from applying.

It is doubly problematic when "tacit knowledge" has been used in DH (idiosyncratically; see Collins and Polanyi) to represent software development as a minority culture imperiled by "dominant, extravagantly vocal and individualist verbal expressions." This is an ideological reversal of the fact that software development is a prestige domain both within DH and in contemporary U.S. culture at large and that, far from being a marginalized culture, it is marginalizing, insofar as it is structurally exclusionary of women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

Saying "you are welcome here" (as a student or participant but not as a leader or invited speaker) may ameliorate this structural exclusion, but not much.

I see the demystification of "tacit knowledge" as a salutary project, and I wish this symposium all success. But this is not a model for inclusivity. We can and should do better.


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Collins, Harry M. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

———. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

If some poetry boys exhibit pack behavior, so what?

—Johanna Drucker, "Politics of It All?, The," The noulipian Analects, ed. Wertheimer and Viegener

Modern Female Automatisms

I'm not teaching this semester, but my book list for next semester is due exceedingly soon. I think it'll have to be one of those late-nite activities, since looking up ISBNs doesn't take a lot of brain. ("Night," when preceded by "late-," is properly spelled "nite." True facts.)

I've done a poor job of articulating the course's interest and importance of late, mostly because I haven't been in the teaching zone, but it's about gender and the discourses of automatism circa 1900, and is in some degree related to the talk I'll be giving at MSA next month on Stein and repetition. Repetition structures normality and (as a "compulsion") pathology, habit and obsession; it's evidence of mechanicity and, in its ability to provoke laughter, also a site of evidence of the human. Butler brilliantly makes repetition the scene of gender.

We'll read/watch some of the classic Lady Robots texts of the Gilded Age and early C20—L'Ève future, Metropolis, "In the Cage," "Melanctha." We'll also look at some contemporary nonfiction theories of mechanicity and gender, like Otto Weininger's theory of variability, the biometrics of Lombroso and Berthillon, and of course Freud, contextualizing them in more recent work by Haraway, Oreskes, Kittler, Hayles, and Fleissner. I had sort of a lovely (that is, entertaining) Twitter conversation with Chris Forster, Jentery Sayers, and Stephen Ross (probably among others) a week or two ago about modernist humor and the role of gender in Michael North's Machine-Age Comedy, which is one of the problems I intend for the class to investigate.

Roughly, the course will use the rubric of "automatism" to look at female labor; the gendering of humor; affect and the human; objectivity and knowledge; psychopathology c. 1900; and biological determinisms.

Needless to say, I'm still in that grandiose, overly ambitious phase of syllabus-planning. I haven't done all the necessary cutting down, which will have to happen soon. I'm also contemplating some sort of introspective exercise (observing one's repetitions, or the like) that I haven't quite worked out yet. Suggestions welcome.

CFP: Automating Love's Labors (MLA 2012, Seattle)

300-word abstracts and brief bios to all.mla2012@gmail.com by March 15, 2011.

“[A] woman stunts her intelligence to become childlike, turns away from individual identity to become an anonymous biological robot in a docile mass. She becomes less than human...”

     —Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

When Adam requires a companion to alleviate his loneliness, God fashions him one out of a spare bone; if Christ, of whom Adam is the prefiguration, is “begotten, not made,” Eve is pointedly the reverse. Thus when Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam envisions an Ève future (1886), it is perhaps no surprise that this ideal helpmeet should be a machine: she perfects the machinic quality of the original Eve. While a prevalent discourse of the machine age marks out the robotic and the automatic as the cold inverse of real human (often female) affection, British and American texts of the modernist period, broadly conceived, stage the robotic and the automatic as inquiries into the relations between modernity, labor, affect, and gender. From L’Ève future and Metropolis to The Feminine Mystique and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, modernist and mid-century narratives have taken up developments such as Christine Frederick’s domestic Taylorism, advertising’s construction of the credulous female shopper, and the advent of domestic appliances. This panel draws on recent work by Michael North, Jennifer L. Fleissner, Bill Brown, Sianne Ngai, and Minsoo Kang, among others, to inquire into the remarkably tight relationship between the always gendered labors of care--what Eva Feder Kittay has called “love’s labor”--and discourses of automatism in industrial and early postindustrial culture, as they are staged in literary and theoretical interventions in the British and American contexts. By giving new historical groundings to fictions and manifestos that examine the profoundly feminized domain of domestic and affective labor between the 1900s and the 1960s, the papers in this panel also hope to attain a stronger purchase on the broader role of “love’s labor” in more recent decades, from the centrality of affective labor in the postindustrial economy (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Arlie Russell Hochschild), to the cultural and political consequences of Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, Cynthia Breazeal’s “Personal Robots” project, and the Roomba. Moreover, we contend that a focus on the literatures of gendered affective labor can renew scholarly understandings of feminist and vernacular modernisms, feminist forms of liberation, literary stagings of labor and repetition, and a feminist ethic of care.

White children and their natives

Aaron's recent post on the American "bad boy" in Avatar made me think in general about children's narratives that construct a "native" with which the child may have an adventure.

The American bad boy is very, very familiar: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Rip van Winkle, etc. Avatar seems to fall into this (primarily nineteenth-century) tradition as well. There's an extensive literature, from Fiedler to Jehlen and beyond.

I found myself thinking about Aaron's claim that this is a specifically American construction. I think that's right, but it put me in mind of its early twentieth-century non-U.S. cousins as well, who deviate from the model in interesting ways.

Related to the bad boy is the jolly uncle, e.g. the professor in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or Albus Dumbledore, technically a grown-up but a boy (not a girl) at heart. Jolly uncle is British and is there to let you in on some arcane knowledge that will help you on your boyish adventure. He'll also help you subvert the mean (female) housekeeper. It helps that he is an Oxford(ish) professor -- a puerile pedant, as it were.

Swallows and Amazons is also British, and offers yet another model. Here the mother is not to be resisted, because the mother is supremely pliable, an ally in the children's play. She will set you up with regular shipments of butter, eggs, milk, and cake made of butter, eggs, and milk, and will allow herself to be designated a "native" from whom the conquering children can get their various dairy products for free. We don't have a fun uncle/mean mom dynamic here; the mother is perhaps the most fun character of all, the best at playing, the ideal imaginary Indian. She's so good at playing that she is easily conquered.

Oddest of all to think about in the context of Avatar was Anne of Green Gables. Avonlea is a female utopia, and Anne peoples her woods and lakes with other girls and women, in part quite clearly because her tragic past has forced her to invest in objects in lieu of friends (her first best friend is her own reflection in a cabinet), but ultimately because creating alien others -- dryads, naiads, animated plants -- is a form of creative play that marks Anne as interesting.

Yet those creations are also a way of staking claim. As soon as she arrives at Green Gables, before she even knows that she will stay, Anne begins to name things, and thereafter they are in a sense her gentle friends -- hers. She is a second Adam, in her childishness experiencing her own days of prismatic color and offering the adults around her a cherished glimpse. Her "marriage" to her first real friend, Diana, in the garden (a little homespun Eden) confirms rather than undermines her status as namer and master of her environs; Diana never reaches Anne's imaginative capacities, and only ever shows the initiative of an Eve by her multiple failures to adequately enter into Anne's imaginary realm. If anything, Diana acts as the female principle of fun-squelching, not because she is mean but because, like Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly, she simply has an inadequate imagination.

Is Anne a colonist? She is, of course, a "spunky girl," but is she a "bad boy" too?

And what does it mean, in Swallows and Amazons and Anne of Green Gables, that in the absence of indigenous peoples, the children must invent some?