Interrogating Global Humanities Infrastructure

The text of my contribution to the Critical Infrastructure Studies panel at MLA 2018, New York, January 6th, 2018. The panel was framed by comments by Alan Liu (University of California, Santa Barbara), Matthew K. Gold (The Graduate Center, CUNY), and comprised Tung-Hui Hu (The University of Michigan), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Tara McPherson (University of Southern California), and me. The paper argues that in an era when cultural politics are defined by the digital, and the arts and humanities (like all disciplines) are confronted with a complex soup of systems engineering, tools, datasets, and emerging computational methodologies and epistemologies, the intellectual challenge turns from merely critiquing the literary and cultural domain to reflecting on the infrastructure that influences and shapes that activity. Such inquiry calls for a level of self-reflexivity — acknowledgement of the intersection of critic and machine — that demands macro as well as micro focus and a willingness to attend to sometimes dizzying complexity. No easy resolution is possible, Smithies suggests. The promise of critical infrastructure studies is not so much a definition of global humanities infrastructure, as a seed for a genre of writing on and about critical entanglement with computing platforms, methods, and devices.