Chapter 17 Digital Humanities from Below

Speculating on Solidarity Infrastructure

Matthew N. Hannah and Miriam Posner

In the 1966 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Marxist historian E. P. Thompson advocated an analysis of history “from below.” Rather than emphasize the “great men” model of history—from above—Thompson posited that historical research should focus on the commoner, the everyday, the masses. Such an emphasis on “below” proffers a Marxist critique of history, elevating the laboring masses as subjects of history over the powerful, rich, and important. But his model of history was also infrastructural. It required a conceptual restructuring of societal models, attending to base over superstructure, emphasizing below over above. In this chapter, we adapt Thompson’s theory of history to advance “digital humanities from below,” critiquing current infrastructural topologies of the field, which still rely on marquee projects, elite institutions, and academic stars as prime drivers of new research. Instead, we advocate for a “solidarity infrastructure,” offering a speculative infrastructural space that addresses the needs of information workers as a laboring class, redistributes resources from top to bottom, and employs an implicit commitment to openness.

Solidarity infrastructure suggests critiques of late capitalism and the higher-education industrial complex from within digital humanities (DH). We offer a view from the United States but acknowledge the increasingly global nature of these conditions, and of local responses. Similarly, we focus on academic DH to confront issues in that sector but also hope that rehabilitation of academic DH can foster cross-sector solidarity with colleagues laboring elsewhere. Such a speculative infrastructure might seem unlikely, but it maps the topography of current practices while revealing possible futures. This kind of speculation is visible in recent approaches to the study of history, as described by Gavriel Rosenfeld: “I hope to demonstrate that alternative histories lend themselves quite well to being studied as documents of memory. By examining accounts of what never happened, we can better understand the memory of what did” (90). But we can also examine nonexistent current situations as a way to imagine alternatives to what is. Laura Bear (1) describes the magic of “speculation”: “Speculation is akin to practices of divination or magic because it aims to reveal a hidden order of human and non-human ethical powers that explain the past, present and future and make it possible to act.” Reimagining speculation beyond finance capital’s use of the term creates a space for action by revealing the possible.

Within the field of critical infrastructure studies, speculation offers ways to imagine new modes of organizing and structuring our cities, our societies, our ecosystems, and our futures. “Where extrapolation is grounded in probabilistic reasoning,” claims Steven Shaviro, “speculation is rather concerned with possibilities, no matter how extreme and improbable they may be” (1). Speculative infrastructure allows us to imagine new possibilities for the way that things are structured in our world, generating new possible futures (Chattopadhyay; Ziser; Badami). Unlike speculation occasioned by the economic conditions that have exacerbated so many of our most intractable problems, speculative infrastructures provide a glimmer of hope and a trenchant critique of the present, making it possible to act.

Speculation leads us to imagine another possible DH, an alternative universe, not entirely unlike our own, in which organizing structures are built from below. While this proletarian energy has animated the field in particular moments, the concretization over the past twenty years has tended toward increasing institutionalization and big-name initiatives rather than rhizomatic solidarity. And while there have been important and sustained critiques of DH and labor (Flanders; Keralis; Boyles et al; Pawlicka-Deger; Smithies, Ffrench, and Ciula), there have been few developments at an infrastructural level to mitigate neoliberalism within the field or suggest a political economy of DH (Hannah). Situated as we are in the United States, which has witnessed one of the worst declines in public education due to neoliberal economic austerity, we propose a speculative infrastructure for DH from below.

Three Spheres of Solidarity Infrastructure

Ideology

We need to reconceptualize our relationship to our own labor. We know that labor in DH is delightfully heterogeneous, occurring in various modalities and at various locations within and beyond academia, but we must accept that academic DH distills a particular set of labor issues. Such labor extends beyond the technical to organizational, affective, administrative, intellectual, and physical labor, which forms the base of program development and maintenance in DH. Glaringly, most DH labor in the United States is not performed by tenure-track faculty. However, most of the leadership in academic DH still is. We must imagine ourselves as a laboring class, across all ranks, disciplines, and DH communities, and organize according to class interests.

Cue immediate bad-faith dismissal of our labor as some form of “privileged labor” because we don’t work in factories. This characterization misses the point. All who labor are bound together because all of us, together, make higher education function. And all who labor at universities and colleges—including custodial staff, graduate and undergraduate student workers, and contingent and tenured faculty—stand to benefit from the recognition and valorization of that labor. Rather than debating “hack” versus “yack,” digital humanists should be arguing for solidarity contra disunity. Indeed, solidarity among academic workers (and from there across to workers in other DH communities) is the only way we can effect real, lasting change. As the wave of labor actions across higher education in recent years has shown, such solidarity can make a huge impact on material conditions.

Class relations are complex, as Marx understood so long ago, and they defy easy categorization into “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie.” It would be foolish to deny that some academic labor is more prestigious, as anyone who has worked in a staff role can attest. It would be absurd to claim, in light of conditions faced by students and workers of color, that we all benefit from the same degree of racial privilege. But the fact that institutions value some labor and people more than others does not erase the basic structural antagonism between administration and university or college labor. How can we establish solidarity while recognizing that our experiences differ in critical ways?

Solidarity infrastructure means developing bottom-up power, in which tenure-track faculty feel more solidarity with staff than with management. Perhaps we can take a cue from theorist McKenzie Wark, who glimpses new laboring relations. Wark argues that the class relation in the twenty-first century is that between information workers and information owners: “Together we form a class, a class as yet to hack itself into existence as itself–and for itself” (para. 013). As we build DH initiatives, we must remember that such efforts are mediated by the owners of our production, the institution. Hacking our way into a recognition of the class relation that structures DH requires a recognition that our work may be coopted by or rely on neoliberal academic initiatives.

To develop a consciousness of ourselves as labor that produces surplus for the higher education system, we need sustained scholarly engagement with neoliberal ideology as such. It remains remarkable to us that the explosion of critical theory in DH has not yet produced a Marxist DH. How can we expect to expose the contradictions inherent within the capitalist institutions of higher education—between knowledge as a public good and the profitability of education, between academic labor and academic austerity, between respect for intellectual pursuit and cynical economic calculation—if we don’t understand our work within capitalism? As Slavoj Žižek puts it: “Now is the time to think.” Now is the time to think about the role of solidarity in our discipline.

Labor

If we understood ourselves as a laboring class, what is the nature of our work? As a hacker class, how do we contribute our labor to the function and sustenance of the neoliberal university or college? Who owns the information we produce, and how do we organize ourselves to ensure our rights as workers, thereby improving working conditions across the institution? How can we spread awareness that the material conditions of higher education within 21st-century capitalism affect the lived experience of everyone who works for our institutions?

With a few notable exceptions, DH in the United States has avoided such questions, focusing on the symptoms rather than the virus. A solidarity infrastructure arising out of class consciousness recognizes that, while a tenure-track professor at an Ivy League university is not the same as a public librarian at a regional library, a lecturer at a small liberal-arts college, or a graduate student at a regional university, we are all subject to forms of class oppression, simply because we are workers from whose labor the institution extracts value. These vectors of oppression are different, but still operative and visible if we choose to see them. By recognizing the differences and highlighting the similarities, we can advance solidarity across institutions, disciplines, and classes to support the most marginalized, while inculcating class consciousness among the most privileged.

Solidarity infrastructure would enable us to redistribute privileges toward the most marginalized while establishing a network of cooperation and mutual aid. Solidarity infrastructure would be built on organizing from the bottom up as follows:

Start academic unions on every campus, using our digital skills to organize.
Commit to solidarity with all campus workers, including with service workers, whose unionization efforts so often serve as an example to the rest of us.
Establish a DH worker’s caucus to raise the concerns of constituencies with the community and share local grievances with the entire field.
Establish a repository of resources for students, postdocs, and nontenure-track faculty.
Establish fund-raising mechanisms for labor strikes and actions, for the material support of precarious colleagues, and for student resources.

Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci sought to understand the role that power can play in maintaining its legitimacy, calling this infrastructural relationship “hegemony.” For Gramsci, hegemony was “cultural, moral, and ideological” leadership of a group over the subaltern (Forgacs 423). But hegemony can be maintained only through the consent of those who are led. How are we offering that consent? How can we refuse or withhold it? As we have seen all too clearly, institutional values do not necessarily align with personal and ethical values. In far too many instances, universities ignore the values of their workers, choosing to retain a problematic coach or professor, choosing to cut benefits or salaries of workers, choosing to destroy entire academic ecosystems to save money rather than redistribute resources. How can we use our labor to resist the hegemony of academic administrations and boards of trustees?

In addition, we should reimagine the role that our professional organizations can and should play. DH professional organizations either can shore up the hegemony of neoliberal educational institutions by feigning neutrality or they can operate in solidarity with workers everywhere through focused political education, organizing, and solidarity efforts. For too long, our professional organizations have remained silent as our comrades struggle within an increasingly cruel and austere academic infrastructure, an infrastructure that is falling apart due to the contractions of capitalism. We are witnessing our friends and colleagues being consumed by the machinery of the neoliberal academic market, with little notice from the organizations that we fund. Rather than attempt to remain neutral as higher education collapses—as though neutrality were possible—our organizations could:

Strategize with existing labor organizations such as the American Federation of Teachers. Colleagues at colleges and universities in the United Kingdom do this as a matter of course, as members of the University and College Union (UCU).
Offer training and events at conferences around workers’ rights and solidarity, such as what occurred at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in 2023.
Employ the existing organizational framework to support the most vulnerable among us, especially in an age of increased assaults on higher education by far-right ideologues.
Redirect a portion of member dues to support organizing efforts at campuses around the country.
Lobby political leaders to improve conditions at universities through expanded state funding.
Speak publicly in support of striking faculty, staff, and students.

Fostering a solidarity infrastructure means recognizing the intersections between our work as laborers and other forms of marginalization and oppression. As is said often on social media, the university will not love you back. While we have seen neoliberal institutions respond to oppression and marginalization of specific identities through administrative diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, we argue that such efforts must recognize the economic disparities which affect such identities at disproportionate rates. If we want a healthy educational system, we must recognize the economic and material conditions in which we work and how they impede broader efforts to build a more just academy. Higher education is broken because it has been transformed from a public good into a capitalist knowledge industry. But as capitalism continues to collapse, so does our current model of higher education. Unfathomable debt, increasing austerity, and attacks on academic freedom are eroding the very raison d’être of education in the United States, and we can no longer afford to ignore the economic and material realities in which DH exists. We can take a cue from the progress toward solidarity already happening around the world and advance a solidarity infrastructure that means getting our hands dirty to make material conditions better for all.

Bibliography

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Chapter 18 Imagining a Future of Multimedia E-books

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