DHPoco Summer School Forums

In much the same way as Clement Greenberg argued abstract expressionism was a reaction to Cold War politics in the U.S., McPherson cites a host of scholars on the consequences for academia of the same time period, one of isolation, fragmentation, inward looking, epitomized by the New Criticisms’ fetishizing of the text, and only the text. The question then becomes how do we escape our own zeitgeist, which vacillates between valorizing the political potential of the digital (i.e. Arab spring, OWS often said to have never been possible without Twitter/FB) and condemning slacktivism or click activism? The historian in me wants a further explanation of what in the zeitgeist pushed towards modularity. What ways of seeing and knowing (lenticular v stereoscopic) facilitate an integrated approach? The lenticular reflects the desire to flatten identity to singular vectors, to resist the intersectionality that increasingly historically challenged univectoral analyses of sexism, racism, classism. The metonymic function then of one oppression standing in for the whole, which undergirds early days of organizing many identity based social movements, may achieve one specific goal (or task) but at the cost of making invisible the inter-related, but unaddressed, goals of attacking the roots of oppression, and in fact, may tend towards reinforcing hegemony (as evidenced by McPherson’s discussion of increased segregation, increased economic disparity). How though do we get to the stereoscopic, the ability to see simultaneously, two (or more) things at once? I think feminist critical race studies has much to offer us here. I’m thinking of Sandoval in particular.

Many of the issues McPherson raises resonate with my own study of social movements. Re Baltimore and lack of discussion on race? My first thought? Basic lesson from social movements, anything invite only is going to be more homogenous. Problems with Cyberstructuralism, well those are the same critiques social movement activists made of poststructuralism in late 1970s. The earliest critiques of representation and creation in digital media parallel that of earlier critiques of media, such as the one I am most familiar with, representations of women in art and lack of art by women. Not to get all Santayana, but history provides lots of excellent examples of how to proceed. I am particularly fond of Sandoval’s idea of oppositional and differential consciousness, which has proved so fruitful for a whole host of other thinkers, not the least of which is Donna Haraway’s idea of cyborg feminism. There is an interesting discussion of Sandoval’s theories in relation to technology in Dialogues between Paul Virilio
and Chela Sandoval. Towards a better understanding of uses and abuses of new technologies.By INGRID MARIA HOOFD http://www.genders.org/g39/g39_hoofd.html

Yes, I would like to be cited if you want to use part of it, to indicate it was written by me, independently of the DH conf talk