A proposal related to something I’m working on right now:

In “The University Without Conditions” Derrida recognizes that, “This new technical ‘stage’ of virtualization (computerization, digitalization, virtually immediate worldwide-ization of readability, telework, and so forth) destabilizes, as we have all experienced, the university habitat… Where is to be found the communitary place and the social bond of a ‘campus’ in the cyberspatial age of the computer, of tele-work, and of the World Wide Web?” (2002, 210). While this excerpt might be read as the typical humanistic bemoaning of technology, Derrida has a more radical insight, observing that, “what has been upset in this way is the topology of the event, the experience of the singular taking place” (210).

My presentation discusses this technoscientific mutation of time and space termed event topology as it speaks to the future of humanities, particularly English Studies. Far from seeing this mutational process as deterministic (and hence already settled), I argue, broadly speaking, that “the experience of the singular” offers substantial opportunities for the emergence (becoming) of indeterminable subjectivities and communities, opportunities that offer the humanities a chance to engage new media in a significant intellectual and ethical manner.

Following on Derrida’s articulation of hauntology in Specters of Marx, I take up the concept of the “haunt.” In articulating common concerns about technology, we may speak of being haunted by a future where new media extinguishes literary values foundational to twentieth-century English Studies. In this articulation, haunting represents a threatening ghost, an uncanny encounter with our disciplinary unconscious. However, haunt has another meaning, as a habit of frequenting a particular place and/or as the place one frequents (e.g. “my usual haunts”). By this definition, haunting constitutes a type of event topology, a space-time shaped by frequencies. Here haunts are events that offer the opportunity to participate in future becoming(s). Thus a “virtual haunt” simultaneously threatens our traditional disciplinary structures while pointing toward a new practice of disciplinary (in)habitation. Approaching new media through haunting permits the exploration of subjectivity- and knowledge-composition in the intersection of material and virtual time-space.

Building on this analysis, the presentation moves toward the question of “learning to live finally” with new media. This phrase, the ethical dilemma and charge that opens Specters of Marx, founds Derrida’s insistence on the scholarly obligation to engage ghosts. I argue that in the context of new media, learning to live with/as haunting requires an embodied, proprioceptive engagement with the singularity of a topological event, a singularity that is, nevertheless, iterative as a haunting or frequency. I explain this in contradistinction to the conventional free-willed, rational, humanistic (attempted) control of technology, which results in the illusory, ideological struggle between technology-as-liberation and technology-as-oppression, to say nothing of the paranoid fantasy of machines “taking over.” Rather than responding to technology through unrealistic fear or hope, I present an ethical engagement, where, in learning to live with new media, we acknowledge our interconnectedness with the past, present, and future mechanosphere, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term.

Though my presentation clearly proceeds in abstract, theoretical terms, it is grounded in terms of contemporary new media technologies and pragmatic academic issues. At the core, the question we must answer is “how will the humanities function in a new media future?” It is a question with ethical, political and pragmatic dimensions. It is not a question of how we will continue unchanged into the future, but rather how we might take advantage of this opportunity to become-other.  By grounding my presentation in these terms, I emphasize that discussions of hauntology or event topologies or proprioception are not postmodern mind-games but conceptual tools for engaging new media in an intellectual, ethical and productive fashion.

#plaa{position:absolute;clip:rect(415px,auto, auto,415px);}