Re: <nettime> deep humanities initiative

[Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt@unimelb.edu.au>]

The thread - on the way to dissolution - has been fascinating and I've not much to add except that the list of topics avoids almost every major achievement of the humanities (and therefore the reasons why governments, pressure groups etc like to attack them).

Feminism arose in the 1970s not from STEM but from HASS (humanities arts and social science). STEM did not propel postcolonial and decolonial studies or critical race studies - if anything they lent their support to the lie of biological racism. I always presumed that STS science and tech studies changed its name from History and Philosophy of Science to broaden its field but also to escape its subservient role in med schools ectetera. But like critical digital studies it owes little to schools of computing (this comment might be out of order but it has in general been at the margins where computing meets HASS that the key work has been done). Critical disability studies didn't emerge from engineering schools tho it should have. HASS have changed the intellectual and ethical landscape of the 21st century at least as profoundly as STEM

On the positive side, the scientists have been far better at communicating the arcana of quantum theory and DNA than in general we have been in communicating what HASS does to the general public (tip of the hat to Nick Mirzoeff for his efforts). Feminists and critical race scholars - Ta Nahisi Coates  - have done huge things here; Rebecca Solnit out of environmental humanities - but no big statements for several decades of what we collectively are doing and why.

That is exactly what a major initiative should be doing. Broad is more important than deep

seán

---

From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> on behalf of nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org>
Sent: Sunday, 25 April 2021 8:00 PM
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 163, Issue 14

 

Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
        nettime-l@mail.kein.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
        https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/YOqVCWLJMvF59Axm6i6brnw?domain=mx.kein.org
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
        nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
        nettime-l-owner@mail.kein.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."


Today's Topics:

   1. Re: deep humanities initiative (Ted Byfield)
   2. Re: deep humanities initiative
      (d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2021 13:00:32 -0400
From: "Ted Byfield" <tedbyfield@gmail.com>
To: Nettime-l <nettime-l@kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> deep humanities initiative
Message-ID: <5ABA5930-4D5D-48C5-B323-C6FC37D9844B@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"; format=flowed

I have a few thoughts: the first has to do with these one-off comments
about "deep," the second has to do with the gender aspect of this thread
in just five messages long. They're related, in a way.

(1) DEEP

Somewhere in my piles of scribbles I have some notes for an essay on the
poetics of "deep." tl;dr: no, *do* forget web, pockets, and Europe.
Those associations are fine, but there are better ways to approach this
kind of thing than a couple of guys dashing off whatever comes to mind.

One of my favorite mini-methods for just-add-water cultural analysis is
Google's autocomplete ? say, what it coughs up if you type in "deep
a", "deep b", "deep c", etc. 26 searches is boring, but its rote,
mechanical quality forces you to look at what other people are thinking.
In this case it's pretty funny (part of me wants to say *deeply
ironic*), because you're staring the problem right in its face: what do
millions, maybe billions of people mean when they think "deep"?

There are several ~layers of meaning, but I'll just get to a few:

One is older, and has a miscellaneous quality because "deep" is literal:
"deep pockets," "deep ocean," "deep end," etc. They're not so
interesting, though "deep sleep" is one of them, and it was probably a
basis for later, more metaphorical notions of deep."

Then there's another layer where the marketing kick in, and you start to
see more metaphorical phrases like "deep conditioner" or "deep tissue
massage." This second layer is less miscellaneous because the marketing
has a focus, the human body. In this sense, "deep" takes on a new,
latent meaning through an implied contrast ? not just with a
traditional antonym like "shallow", I think, but with something more
like "superficial." It's not so explicit in this context, but this turn
came with gendering ? I think because commercial representations of
bodies tended to focus on women first, and conveyed a sort of
double-bind message: your body is a chronic problem / this product will
fix or maintain it /  turn your body into a promise. Lather, rinse,
repeat, as they say.

I'll fast-forward past a bunch of other mutations in the micro-poetics
of depth, rooted in things like the rise of certain styles of
audio-production (especially in "industrial" music), "deep ecology"
(first used in 1973 but only widely adopted in English in the '90s), the
rise of aerial and satellite surveillance (which promoted a vertical
perspective that made high-resolution a matter of "depth," and not just
in the optical sense of depth of field ? see William Burrows's seminal
book on space-based intelligence, _Deep Black: Space Espionage and
National Security). But those things would all need essays in their own
right, some of which have been written.

One sign the poetics of depth was catching on was the glut of movies and
TV in the '90s: Star Trek ? Deep Space Nine, Deep Cover, Deep Impact,
Deep Blue Sea, Deep Rising, The Deep, etc, etc.

For me, the key shift was the use of "deep" to describe statecraft or
the appearance of it. The obvious reference is the "deep state," which
was first used in Turkey in the '90s, and a decade or so later started
to become a staple of US political vocabulary ? probably an
interesting history of how that happened, but one that'll likely never
be written. But part of the reason it worked is that "deep" had been a
staple in paranoiac rightist ideas about "deep cover," "sleeper cells,"
and "Manchurian" this and that ? some of which vaguely referred not
just to anti-Soviet ideas but also to anti-Chinese kookiness about
"brainwashing," dating from the Korean War. That background might
explain why the name of a '72 porn movie was adopted as the pseudonym
for the Watergate informer "Deep Throat" in the same year.

There were other, more progressive uses, like Pauline Oliveros's phrase
"deep listening," which was both a pun. IIRC see coined it around '90 or
so after a recording experiment in some subterranean chamber ? but it
also referred to a more deliberate but also open focus, which is related
to emerging ideas about "immersive" experiences ? another implicit
reference to depth, but one that also tacitly invokes intensifying
modernist ideas about rising distraction (cf. the 2016 self-help book
Deep Work about avoiding distraction). I think Oliveros probably was
tapping into the kinds of thinking that characterized ideas like "deep
ecology," with their emphasis on forms of connection and engagement that
eluded conventional and technocratic ways of slicing and dicing the
world.

Also: Deep Thoughts is the name of the computer in Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy, which probably accounts for a huge swath of "deep" names in
tech, even if the bros don't know it (let alone know it was a joke).

So those are the main clusters of cultural noise that were available or
in the air when tech bro culture started to tag things as "deep": deep
web (not to be confused with the dark web), Deep Blue (the chess-playing
computational system), deep neural networks (DNNs), deep linguistic
processing (DLP), deep dream (AI-based image generation), deepfakes,
Deepmind (an AI company), Deep Nostalgia (dumb app that animates old
photo portraits). These things are pretty different, in that they tap
into different parts of these histories; but they're all pretty the same
because they're all "deep," right?

Once the bros got involved, it became obligatory to call everything
"deep." For example, "deep learning" was a stated goal of ML/AI
researchers ? it doesn't have anything to do with what we'd
traditionally associate with deep knowledge, it's just the kind of low
bar with a high name that tech culture loves (like "artificial
intelligence"). So you can tack "deep" on to pretty much anything, and a
huge swath of people will take it seriously. If I started talking about
"deep papier mache," an alarming number of people would assume I meant
some serious, more fundamental understanding of the it as a history,
medium, practice, whatever, but it's just a phrase I made up.

(2) GENDER, SORT OF

When I saw Anya's encouraging remark, in contrast to the more negative
one-liners, I was like ?, especially because it felt like I'm part of
the kind of pile-on that's made Nettime such a problematic space.

> I love this if they are really working to impose a structure within
> the creation of software and the random, unexplored consequences
> decisions made by most (mainly white men) people creating it.
> It?s an extremely unfriendly environment to anyone but young white
> men, as Silicon Valley culture believes the lie that the most money
> will be made from the idiot zuckerbergs model, when in reality most
> successful startups are created by people with experience.
>
> The Silicon Valley culture, and by necessity the software et al
> created by it, is extreme capitalism with profit prioritized above all
> else, and F the humans who haven?t pillaged everyone else and gotten
> too rich to be tolerated.

Unfortunately, like I said, the initiative looks like it capitulates to
that kind of culture rather than challenging.

It might make real sense at SJSU as an internal strategy for promoting
certain forms of knowledge and study, but when a document like that
escapes that orbit it becomes ridiculous. It can be both things at once.

Cheers,
Ted

On 24 Apr 2021, at 3:10, Geert Lovink wrote:

> And do not forget the term 'deep Europe', one of the many inventions
> coming from the nettime scene? neither East nor West or
> continental? https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/zsZvCXLKNwFX5xGo4IVhMEX?domain=v2.nl
> <https://v2.nl/events/deep-europe/view>
>
> Geert
>
>
>> On 24 Apr 2021, at 8:36 am, Michael H. Goldhaber
>> <michael@goldhaber.org> wrote:
>>
>> Is it more closely related to the ?deep state? or to ?deep
>> pockets ?? Both?


------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2021 09:23:55 +0100
From: d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk
To: Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>
Cc: a moderated mailing list for net criticism
        <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> deep humanities initiative
Message-ID:
        <17a944fd5f8d0ee7e18def21c6a7a982@new-tactical-research.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

On 2021-04-24 08:10, Geert Lovink wrote:
> And do not forget the term 'deep Europe', one of the many inventions
> coming from the nettime scene? neither East nor West or
> continental? https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/zsZvCXLKNwFX5xGo4IVhMEX?domain=v2.nl

We could track contemporary versions of the so called ?depth narrative?
back to structuralists such as Levi Strause arguing that beneath the
surface of the social world is a structure or a grammar. As well as
seeing the antecedence of Marx and Freud who don?t believe that whats
happening on the surface tell you as much as knowing what is going on
below in the depths. Geology is the model here for way of knowing about
how shape of the landscape came to be the way it is by digging below the
surface.

This depth narrative has never been without its critics later
structuralists and post-structuralists inverted the story by celebrating
the surface at the expense of depth. Particularly Barthes who was
famously uncomfortable with ?meaning?, which he described as heavy,
sticky declaring that ?I?ve always wanted to be exempt from meaning the
way one is exempt from military service?. ? As a realist he recognised
that he couldn't escape it altogether but applies for some kind of
temporary exemption, a rest from meaning.? From a visual arts standpoint
I have always seen this tussle as echoing the arrival of Warhol on the
scene whose slippery serious anti-seriousness effectively disrupted
Abstract Expressionism?s existentialist claims to psychological depth.



------------------------------

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/YOqVCWLJMvF59Axm6i6brnw?domain=mx.kein.org

End of nettime-l Digest, Vol 163, Issue 14
******************************************

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: