Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies

UCLA UCLA Previously Published Works Title Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3n0096h4 Journal PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, 131(2) ISSN 0030-8129 Author Carruth, Allison Publication Date 2016-03-01 DOI 10.1632/pmla.2016.131.2.364 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California [ PMLA the changing profession Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies IN 2009 WILLIAM PANNAPACKER PRONOUNCED THE DIGITAL HUMAN- ITIES TO BE “THE FIRST ‘NEXT BIG THING’ IN A LONG TIME” PROMISING to reconfigure and reinvigorate the humanities. The same could allison carruth now plausibly be said about the environmental humanities with the recent rise of dedicated academic centers (at, e.g., KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Sweden; Princeton University; the Uni- versity of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah), grant- funded projects (like the Sawyer Seminar on the Environ- mental Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the consortium Humanities for the Environment ), and faculty positions. If the digital and environmental humanities have been ascendant amid what Christopher Newield describes as the “un- making” of public higher education and what Richard Grusin terms the “crisis humanities,” such an assessment invites the question of whether the ecological digital humanities (EcoDH) might serve to combine the most saleable facets of the digital humanities and the environmental humanities for university stakeholders who promote applied humanities work outside academia or, alternatively, a hybrid method for researching, teaching, and designing cultural responses to structures of ecological and social precarity (Grusin 80). While these potential futures of EcoDH could unfold simultane- ously, I aim in what follows to pave the way for this hybrid method, by ofering a supplemental framework for connecting the environmental and digital humanities, which this essay terms ecological media studies. A prompt for academic inquiry as well as collaboration ALLISON CARRUTH , associate professor outside academia, this framework combines scholarly attentiveness in the Department of En glish and the to the material ecologies of new media and digital computing with Institute for Society and Genetics at the the participatory, playful media practices at work in twenty- irst- University of California, Los Angeles, is century environmental art and activism. he new materialist provo- afﬁliated with the university’s Institute cation to understand all bodies—human, animal, plant, mineral, of the Environment and Sustainability. She is the author of Global Appetites: microbial, machine, and inanimate—in their material and semantic American Power and the Literature of lives and in their networked and individuated phases informs my Food (Cambridge UP, 2013). conceptualization of ecological media studies by suggesting that the © 2016 allison carruth 364 PMLA 131.2 (2016), published by the Modern Language Association of America 131.2 ] Allison Carruth 365 ubiquity of ecological metaphors for the digi- from what Buell terms irst- wave ecocriticism profession changing the tal (from data mining to media ecology itself) (“Ecocriticism”). Namely, environmental hu- obscures the matter of digital technologies. manities projects are expanding the param- eters of environmental culture by addressing not only literary texts but also visual art, The Ecological Digital Humanities: performance, new media, activist ephemera, Genealogies and Horizons popular science, ethnographies, and scientiic In a 2004 primer, Greg Garrard deines eco- models; by imagining nature to include cities, criticism capaciously as the literary and cul- food systems, diasporas, indigenous cosmolo- tural study of ecological problems wherein gies, and global energy networks along with rhetorical analysis is central. Garrard ob- wilderness sites and rural locales; and by de- serves that the organizing premise of such an veloping critical theories of the environment. endeavor is the notion that “environmental Two publications illustrate these intel- problems require analysis in cultural as well lectual trends and open onto the question of as scientiic terms, because they are the out- what imperatives and ideas are shaping (or come of an interaction between ecological might shape) EcoDH. he irst is a 2009 Criti- knowledge of nature and its cultural inlec- cal Inquiry essay that has become required tion,” or, more aptly, inlections (14). In step reading in the environmental humanities: the with Lawrence Buell and Ursula K. Heise,1 postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Garrard traces the history of ecocriticism “he Climate of History.” Organized around from an initial focus on nature writing, wil- four theses, the essay posits that the science of derness rhetoric, and local place- based identi- anthropogenic climate change—which shows ties to widening concerns with environmental that with industrialization humans become justice, urban ecologies, other- than- human geological agents and which accordingly sug- bodies, and the environmental consequences gests an epochal shit from the Holocene to of colonialism and globalization. Ecocriticism what has been provisionally termed the An- by this measure has become a “convenient thropocene—requires a new historiographic shorthand,” as Heise puts it, for variegated ap- practice. Such a practice, Chakrabarty con- proaches that fall under the headings of “en- tends, should start by jettisoning “the age- old vironmental criticism, literary- environmental humanist distinction between natural his- studies, literary ecology, literary environ- tory and human history” (201). While critics mentalism, and green cultural studies”—a of Anthropocene discourse have cautioned catalog to which we could add theoretically against its tendency toward a universalism and politically inlected ields such as post- that elides the unequally shared causes and colonial ecologies, environmental justice consequences of climate change, Chakrabarty cultural studies, and material ecocriticism mostly avoids this pitfall in arguing that en- (“Hitchhiker’s Guide” 506).2 As ecocriticism vironmental history—and by extension the has become more multiform over the last de- environmental humanities—best responds to cade, so too have ecocritics resituated their climate change by bringing “together intellec- work within the environmental humanities, tual formations that are somewhat in tension deined to include literature, media studies, with each other: the planetary and the global; science studies, philosophy, history, art his- deep and recorded histories; species thinking tory, cultural geography, and anthropology and critiques of capital” (213). his idea has (not to mention the digital humanities). How- particular implications for EcoDH. If we fol- ever multidisciplinary, the environmental hu- low Chakrabarty’s argument, a ield sited at manities arguably cohere in how they depart the convergence of ecological problems and 366 Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies [ PMLA digital humanities methods should strive to that employs spatial mapping as well as text- interlace the timescales of “deep and recorded mining methods. Scholars like Chakrabarty histories” with the compressed temporality and Alaimo suggest the importance of histo- of the digital (as in the real- time cadence of ricizing and materializing the digital technol- rapid prototyping, database querying, and ogies that constitute the research apparatus of media streaming) and to recognize not only such EcoDH projects by mapping those tech- the bodies of species and institutions of capi- nologies onto timescales slower than the real- tal but also the virtual networks that connect, time “interval” of “versions, updates, and . track, and animate both. half- lives” and by apprehending them within The second publication with insights material networks composed of biological the changing profession changing the for EcoDH is Bodily Natures, by the femi- and engineered bodies (Raley 39). nist science studies scholar Stacy Alaimo, who has been at the forefront of the material The Digital Humanities: turn. Like the collections Material Feminism From Computational Techniques to (which she coedited) and Material Ecocriti- Material Conditions cism (to which she contributed an essay), Bodily Natures takes nature seriously in its I will return to Chakrabarty’s and Alaimo’s concrete multiplicities—presenting Alaimo’s principles below in pivoting from EcoDH to research on the science and culture of X- rays, ecological media studies. As a bridge, I turn toxic chemicals, deep -sea creatures, and plas- now to recent calls for the digital humanities tic compounds. In doing so, it contests ten- writ large to examine and intervene in the ma- dencies in poststructuralism, posthumanism, terial social conditions of network society and and certain strands of ecocriticism to abstract digital infrastructure. In dialogue with other nature from its material and historical in- scholars, N. Katherine Hayles locates the ori- stantiations. To guide her research, Alaimo gins of the digital humanities in decades- old develops a theory of transcorporeality, a the- humanities computing eforts to digitally pre- ory rooted in the idea that “the material self serve and parse text archives. These efforts cannot be disentangled from networks that laid

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