0.1 Sustainability: the elephant in the room

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“Sustainability” is a dark but potent word in the field of digital humanities. It signals a broad set of concerns—they are both technical and institutional—about how to maintain and augment the increasingly large body of information that humanists are both creating and using.

But sustaining what precisely? How and for how long? Indeed, why do we have a problem at all?

These may seem absurdly obvious questions, and in a certain obvious sense they are. But like most obvious questions, their transparency is deceptive. This becomes clear, I think, if we pose a few questions—rhetorical and hypothetical: Would the problems go away if we had access to a lot more money? Or technical support? Or perhaps if all our scholarly projects had well-crafted business plans?

To think that they would is a fantasy we all, in our different ways and perspectives, have to reckon with. Of course funding and technical support are necessary, but to fixate there is to lose sight of the more difficult problems we’re facing. These are primarily political and institutional. And those political and institutional pressures distort the view of those who are trying to frame strategies and general policy. As you will see, I will be taking some of my own experiences and myopias as instructive cases.

Our situation reminds me of the problem that organizes Kathy Acker’s notorious fiction Empire of the Senseless . At a pivotal moment in the action, Acker’s heroine Abhor finds herself in a maze of difficulties. Trying to discover what has caused the mess of her life and how to escape, Abhor realizes she has herself been multiplying her problems. Her life takes a decisive turn for the better when she sees she has been asking the wrong question. Abhor changes the question from “what is the problem” to “who are the agents” —social and individual—shaping the field in which she has been such a dismal wanderer. Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 112. The shift has two important effects: it dissipates the fog of abstractions that has made such a comedy of her life; and it begins to free her from her circumstantial, and thus largely reactive, view of her experience.

So let’s begin to think about the current state of humanities scholarship under that Abhorrent sign: “Not what but who.”

Humanities scholarship was—and still precariously is—created and sustained through the interoperation of four institutional agents. Three of them are structurally foundational, like three persons in one secular deity: the scholars themselves (working within a network of educational and professional organizations); publishing entities, especially university presses and professionally-authorized journals; and libraries and depositories, where this work is collected and made accessible for reflection and repurposing. There is also an important fourth agent, scholarship’s Church Militant. This would be the various public and private funding entities that provide crucial financial support to the ongoing life of culture.