The question is, are you building something, silently, with your strong, manly hands?

(A question that still crops up.)

Whether or not you 'like' a landscape is unimportant. It does not ask you for your opinion. (186)

—Jean-François Lyotard, "Scapeland," in The Inhuman (trans. Bennington and Bowlby)

[S]cientific perception—especially when elevated to the level of systematic observation, often in carefully designed setups—is disciplined in every sense of the word: instilled by education and practice, checked and cross-checked both by other observers and with other instruments, communicated in forms—text, image, table—designed by and for a scientific collective over decades and sometimes centuries (as in the cse of botanical descriptions of new species). This kind of perception may still be specific to the human species and historical context—it is not the "view from nowhere," independent of "the species of the individual's makeup and position in the world." But neither is there anything capricious or mystical about it. (102)

—Lorraine Daston, "On Scientific Observation," Isis 99.1 (March 2008): 97-110.

Held in abusive custody by the laws of becoming, they hang on to your finger for dear life. (139)

—Avital Ronell, "On the Unrelenting Creepiness of Childhood: Lyotard, Kid-Tested," in Minima Memoria, ed. Nouvet, Stahuljak, and Still

Baptisons-la infantia, ce qui ne se parle pas. Une enfance qui n'est pas un âge de la vie et qui ne se passe pas. Elle hante le discours. Celui-ci ne cesse pas de la mettre à l'écart. Mais il s'obstine, par là même, à la constituer, comme perdue. A son insu, il l'abrite donc. Elle est son reste. Si l'enfance demeure chez elle, ce n'est pas quoique mais parce qu'elle loge chez l'adulte. (9)

[Let us baptize that which does not speak infantia. A childhood that is not a phase of life and which does not pass. It haunts discourse. It {discourse} never ceases to set infancy apart, yet infancy persists, constituting it, as if lost. Unknowingly, then, {discourse} shelters infancy; infancy is its remainder. If infancy remains in its own place, it is not despite dwelling in the adult, but because of it.]

—Jean-François Lyotard, Preface, Lectures d'Enfance (Galilée, 1991; bootleg translation my own fault).

As soon as we attempt to talk about infancy we freeze it; we make it something that "loge chez l'adulte" and "qui ne se passe pas." Yet the fact that it passes is the defining condition of childhood. The state of infancy is all-confining, all-determining, inexorable, and is at the same time always slipping away, minute by minute: that's the point. It's temporary.

Temporariness is a difficult concept; therefore, so is childhood.

If infancy is to be something like a "faculty of enthusiasm," it is because it proceeds from a kind of yes. The child gives itself to the other, and indeed this giving takes a fabulous form, but in the fable there is a yes, a yes that echoes even among all the infantile "noes." [...] If it is possible to envision surviving the grounds for despair provided by this century (in sum, a spreading banality of evil in the face of multiple forms of devastation), it is because there survives in the mind an affirmative relation to non-being, and thus the capacity for opening to the event, for projecting upon an "Is it happening?" This is not a childlike optimism; the joy that is known in infancy cohabits with terror, if only the terror of the jouissance it has known. The "yes" is radically dispossessed; it opens, and it opens in, Jean-François says, a "desert" of desolation. (136)

—Christopher Fynsk, "Jean-François's Infancy," in Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard, ed. Claire Nouvet, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Kent Still (Stanford UP, 2007)

Against this view it is urged that we underestimate the automatic powers of the normal subject. We are told that many of the acts which we usually do quite consciously might really be done without consciousness. In support of this assertion such facts are pointed out, as men completely undressing without knowing it, when their attention is distracted by other matters.

—Leon Solomons and Gertrude Stein, "Normal Motor Automatism" (1896)

Yes, you know how it is when that happens. (By the way, Solomons did the write-up.)

Three days a week I get to talk with undergrads about feminism and robots. I love my life.

Excellent story of the day: a student's baby brother started picking up words from a Furby.

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? [...] Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1929

One Week, One Tool

"A digital humanities barnraising."

It is striking how the project is presented. This much labor, measured out in terms of this much time, produces this product. The meting out of time for product, the neat measuredness of each, is here pointed up as the essence of the project. It almost doesn't matter what the tool is. The workshop wasn't designed to solve any particular problem. It was set up to construct one unit of "product" in one unit of time.

This is by and large the opposite of digital humanities labor, which is interstitial, ongoing, and in significant part custodial (to take my own example: time spent blocking spammers at Arcade). This is of course why the language of "one week, one tool" is appealing.

One week, one book. One week, one conference. Are we feeling productive yet?

What does this mean, that we are the gold farmers? It means that in the age of postfordist capitalism it is impossible to differentiate cleanly between play and work. It is impossible to differentiate cleanly between nonproductive leisure activity existing within the sphere of play and productive activity existing within the sphere of the workplace. This should be understood in both a general and a specific sense. [...P]ostfordism is a mode of production that makes life itself the site of valorization: that is to say, it turns seemingly normal human behavior into monetizable labor. [...] I dispute the ideological mystification that says: we are the free while the Chinese children are in chains, our computers are a life-line and their computers are a curse. (120-1)

—Alexander R. Galloway, "Does the Whatever Speak?," in Race after the Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (New York: Routledge, 2012)

Two quick links on NTT labor

1. Bérubé on New Faculty Majority and non-tenure-track academic labor. See also the brilliant Goldstone's point on the importance of advocating for tenure and the tenure track as part of improving NTT working conditions.

2. Josh Boldt's already (in)famous adjunct spreadsheet. Well done.