Scaling Algerias, and “what was elided or erased”

Nicholas Mirzoeff’s “’We Are All Children of Algeria’: Visuality and Countervisuality 1954-2011,” crystallizes some problems with the current rhetoric and practice of digital humanities. WAACA is a web-based project produced in Scalar, in association with the journal Vectors, as an extension of Mirzoeff’s book The Right to Look. The site figures its hyperlinks as stops along a “march,” like the 2011 demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt or like anticolonial demonstrations during the struggle for Algerian independence. Despite Mirzoeff's disclaimers, there is an initial miscalculation of taste and ethics in the metaphor, as in other iterations of the “We are all ___” formulation that are always criticized. I don’t disagree with these criticisms, yet WAACA’s defense of metaphoricity isn’t what bothers me the most. You can’t stop a word like “Algeria” from becoming “a metonym for those processes [of independence]”; you can only hope for respect for autonomy and difference to be performed in and through its transformations. I doubt that respect is adequately performed here, but my concern is how it is pushed toward failure by the rhetoric of digital humanities' attempt to shift readers' values toward spatial performance. It's troubling that the conventions that have come to be attached to certain kinds of digital format highlight the technics of virtual object placement, asking the reader to relate to a text spatially at the expense of critique.

“Join the March! There is a march! A demonstration as they say in England, a manifestation in French. The Arabic is مسيرة. What is it? It is a means to put our bodies in space, where they are not intended to be and to make a claim.” This opening gambit establishes the idea that the hyperlinks “are” stops on a march, pointing to the analogy rather than any particular way of thinking about marching. “It is movement through space, a reclamation of space and a place where people and ideas meet. It allows us to be other than the objects of global capital.” Who says so? The substitution of the general claim for a quotation gives the impression that activists think that “movement through space” and meeting people is in itself against “global capital.” Stressing the form of “marching,” which aligns itself in turn with the sheer fact of marching, this declaration leaves aside what the march is about and who the marchers are; it makes it sound as though activists do not see themselves as objects of global capital; it acts as though objects of global capital are not capable of marching. It's fair to say that the logic of the march figure reflects what is emptiest in Occupy, but I doubt that any anticapital group, even Occupy's blandest sectors, has actually taken a stance this vacuous. In the foreground is the supporting claim, that hypermedia “is better suited to reclaiming and exploring these histories [of independence struggle] than the linear text-based narrative.”

Explanations of hypertext are saturated with praise of the format itself, as though I should waste time writing here about the virtues of sentences that follow other sentences and the democratizing effects of standardized type. The project links usefully to Eije-Liese Ahtila's video installation Where is Where? (2008), Vautier and Fanon’s film J'ai huit ans (1961), and other visual resources: that is convenient, not groundbreaking. Why should the novelty (what novelty?) of Scalar excuse an attitude of writing-for-young-adults, writing that would not elsewhere be excusable? “A full ‘read’ of this project would take some time. It's not about getting to the end, this is not a video game. It's about who you want to be, not as a consumer, but as a citizen: for we are all citizens of the International.”

The question “How is Algiers separated in time and space” is presented: “How is

Algiers

separated in time and space?”

What does this mimeticism assume about writing, visuality, and the capacities of the audience? A “How to read” page notes, “The typeface helps to ‘call out’ key ideas and sequences of ideas,” as though Scalar had invented this function of typeface. What the spacing of “Algiers” says, then, is that in this project about Algerias, “Algiers” is a KEY TERM. Who is imagined to get the point better or more viscerally or more enjoyably because of this gesture? It’s impossible that potential readers of Mirzoeff’s Duke UP book would need to be told that “Algiers” is a key term in it. Is the gesture for students who might have stumbled across the site while searching for information? If so, they are grossly underestimated. The implication is that someone who might expect the project to be like a video game (but would they really?) will read it only because it’s on the web and has links and embedded clips. There are millions of books, articles, and films on the web and we’re all in favor of that; collecting and recommending is also necessary, in fact so necessary that it happens every second of every day without anyone’s being paid for it by the NEH or needing to be instructed in how to receive the suggestions. How is it possible, amid this, to “offer . . . practical guidance” of this sort:

“You should feel free to branch off whenever you're getting bored or tired. There are some great things to watch, if you don't like reading online.”

“For those of us who grew up with the codex form of the book, [non-linear reading] can be unnatural, even disturbing. That sense that we don't quite know what to do next shows how deeply ingrained the practices of the codex have become. That is to say, we take it for granted that a book starts at the ‘front.’ It continues in a linear direction, page by page, until the ‘end’ is reached at the back.”

One moment, readers might expect the project to be like a video game; the next, it’s as though we’ve never been on the internet before and are confused by getting off the “Main Route.” No one is in these categories; the staging and condescension of the instructions are fictive. The only guideline that it would be possible not to follow is this one: “The reader trusts the openings that the form presents, without overly indulging in a hermeneutics of suspicion about what was elided or erased.” Isn’t this odd? Why is criticality the only mode excluded in the self-description of what the format is good for? If there is no actual ninety-year-old video game player in the audience, for whose satisfaction are the faux instructions issued? Who benefits? At whose expense? USC pays Vectors’ staff about $30,000 to produce a project, the equivalent of two public university Ph.D. students’ stipends for a year. A list of links would have taken ten minutes and been as serviceable and less insulting, especially in an era in which original research is not supported.

I don’t quite know what to do next, so let me turn to the “Multiple Algerias” page. What does it mean to state that despite the disillusions of independence and after the Algerian civil war, “the ‘people’ did not forget, and in 2011 they once again took to the streets when least expected to remarkable effect”? They didn’t in Algeria, which is why “people” is in quotation marks, and why we’re talking about “Algerias.” It is not offensive to suggest that some effect of the former Algerian independence movements is still happening outside Algeria: it’s offensive to suggest, through the extreme generality of "the 'people'" here, that the fact that it is happening somewhere, anywhere outside Algeria overshadows where, why, or because of whom. The page “Where is Where?” states that “Algerian” has become a metonym for “immigrant” for the French Right, as illustrated by the career itinerary of Jean Le Pen. Thus, bad and good metaphorizations of Algeria are indexed. What can meet the requirements of this situation, though, other than critical analysis and the hypotheses born of it, in addition to indexing? Whether or not critical analysis happens elsewhere (such as in Mirzoeff’s book), and whether or not it occurs in visual, textual and/or hybrid forms, in pithy aphorisms or in lengthy papers, we still must answer the question: what are we actively doing here, on this “march”? If we are just looking at links to visual materials that are interpreted elsewhere, why pretend the research is also going on now, here? I don’t say that interpretations are not in the book; I’m asking how and why the project legitimates itself as a project, as more than a collection of visual materials related to the book's arguments. How can it do so, amid a celebration of movement through space as such? The need to promote the value of the latter seems to leave the project unprepared or unwilling to draw attention to its words. For doing so would immediately take the attention off Scalar.

Thus one thing WAACA refuses to do is link to any books or articles about Algeria, or give any sense of divergent critical positions about the transformations of the Algerian revolution. (The page called “Critical Theory” names some French theorists interested in Algeria; it does not perform any criticism of or theorize about anything.) In fact, just about any “linear text-based narrative,” i.e., article or book, electronic or not, would be better suited to exploring such complexities than a project working within the self-imposed rhetorical conventions--not actual physical limitations--of Scalar/Vectors. The interest of those conventions lies in dramatizing spatial arrangement as an end in itself. Another Scalar project, Evan Bissell’s “The Knotted Line,” is described as “depicting over 50 historical moments, all connected by a flowing, interactive line.” The fifty moments are represented in paintings by Bissell, and I understand that that must have been a lot of work and no doubt of much value. Still, the work’s value is not in the fact that it performed something fifty times or that the connections are represented by a mobile virtual line. The connections are there without the line, and the question is what is said any number of times, and in the relationship of what is said and performed to what precedes it. It isn’t OK to promote digital quantitative values any more than it’s OK to explain the interest of an article by saying that it includes over fifty references. In place of criticality comes a flat statement of the value of the existence of perspectivism, the value that digital humanities is literally invested in exhibiting: “Where, then, is where? It depends where you're looking from, I suspect.” That “Algeria” should then be made an illustration of this complacent attitude is what strikes me as particularly wrong. I don’t know anything about the Algerian revolution or its scholarship, yet I know to be offended by that.