Hi, so I’m going to start with something that we may or may not know.
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Title
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This is from the videogame Bioshock Infinite. The game takes place at the turn of the century, on a floating city called Columbia. Now, the plot is pretty complicated, but this character – Elizabeth – is able to open tears in reality and view parallel dimensions. Here we see one where, instead of Return of the Jedi, the movie retains its original name. Much of the Victorian technology that emerges in Bioshock Infinite is due to Elizabeth’s ability to peer into alternate dimensions where history happened in slightly different ways.
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Of course, as the game progresses, you find out that this alternate history plot includes all the characters as well as the narrative itself. So, Bioshock Infinite uses the structure of recursion and alternate history to experiment with its own narrative – and not just create cool little nerdy fantasies. Of course, the story (like other forms of steampunk) has many problems – mostly with gender but also with race. But overall, I like its experimental approach to history, one that I feel the digital humanities can appropriate in order to embrace what Kari Kraus has called “conjecture” or other speculative forms of inquiry. I’d like to see a DH in which technologies from different periods in history are just spliced together in experimental and conjectural ways to see what would happen if history happened differently.
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This is important to me, because I feel the digital humanities has yet to contend with something that is really popular in media studies: that is, the impact of spreadable forms of media on cultural expression. My fundamental interest as someone who studies digital media and literary studies is the way that cultural ideas are taken and modified by people who may or may not know their original meaning — then untangling that, both for its politically problematic dimensions but also as a method for connecting literary and media studies closer to public forms of discourse that are important in the digital humanities. But, more importantly, many of us in the humanities still think of history as immutable and progressive (despite theoretical arguments to the contrary in a variety of theoretical traditions). Why aren’t we thinking more creatively?
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So, this was from my first book, written with Jason Whittaker, William Blake and the Digital Humanities. It’s a script written in Pearl that is inspired by Blake’s poem “London” and is designed to calculate the gross lung capacity of children screaming from Blake’s life to the present. The script doesn’t technically work, since it depends upon code libraries that do not exist, but if they did exist it would work. Graham Harwood created it as a way of honoring Blake’s work in a different modality. For me, it’s indicative of a larger tradition of artists creatively wrestling with Blake’s work. I argued that these kinds of experiments should be seen as actively intervening in our cultural understanding of Blake as an author and that, instead of comparing it to Blake’s original meaning, literary critics should celebrate the eccentric ways Blake connects with his audiences.
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Of course, this thinking doesn’t begin with Media Studies or the Digital Humanities, it has many precursors in philosophy and critical theory. This Deleuze quote articulates, for me, the stakes of a critical position that takes seriously the act of adaptation. Greg Ulmer’s Heuretics is another, in that it suggests that the use of art to provide alternatives is one way appropriation works. A digital humanities informed by this theoretical tradition would not be content with archiving the past – but would also want to help imagine alternatives.
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So, this is an extended introductory frame to simply say that my interest in steampunk is in developing a digital humanities practice that takes seriously conjecture and experimentation. As many of you might already know, steampunk began with science fiction authors writing what KW Jeter called “Victorian fantasies” in his letter to Locus in 1987 where he first described authors as “steampunks.” For me, steampunk is more interesting than close cousins like neo-Victorian fiction or Gaslight Fantasies because of the way it is interested in constructing alternatives to contemporary technology and in using those alternatives to reenvision their relationship with history. We can see that, not only in the earliest books associated with steampunk (Gibson and Sterling’s Difference Engine, which envisions how Victorian society would be different if Babbage invented the computer in the nineteenth century), but in the more recent interventions by Joseph Bruchac (who imagines a technologically-advanced Native American society with steampunk technology surviving in a post-apocalyptic world) or Diana Pho (who dresses in Asian steampunk and maintains a blog called Beyond Victoriana on the opportunities and problems with appropriation in steampunk).
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I would argue, in fact, that steampunk can offer one way of opening up historically-informed experimental thinking that focus on technology yet are also heavily invested in culture and politics on a material and design level. I call what I do “nineteenth-century digital humanities” to emphasize the kinds of anachronisms and alternate visions of history that steampunk offers. But I think this combination of historical inquiry and conjecture can be applied to all sorts of historical periods, much like steampunk has evolved into clockpunk and bronzepunk. I also call this experimental approach to history “variantological,” in line with Siegfried Zielinski’s approach in Deep Time of the Media, where he describes following the alternatives embodied in media history, rather than seeing history as linear or progressive.
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So, what might this a scholarly approach inspired by steampunk look like? Well, I’m going to show two examples – one from postcolonial steampunk and the other informed by the anthropocene and eco-criticism. One way to investigate the politics of steampunk design would be to look at the way the startup Adaptive Path is appropriating steampunk to appeal to a population in rural India that isn’t happy with the touchscreen user-interface usually found in iPhones.
“Similar to the exaggerated physical interface elements found on objects modded by Steampunk enthusiasts and artists, we designed a mobile device that celebrated physical interface elements like knobs that turn, scroll wheels, and exaggerated buttons. […] Our research uncovered that vibrant sound is an important part of indian culture and most phones designed for Western markets minimize the microphone and speakers. […] Mobile devices are one of the most accessible pieces of technology in the world today and the benefits of communication technology for people throughout the world is limitless. Empathic design is not about forcing conventions and models on users that feel foreign, it’s about empowering users with technology that feels appropriate and familiar.”
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I think, though, that this admittedly interesting approach needs to be contextualized in the long history of telecommunications approaches to the Indian continent. This is from a recent book about how nineteenth-century media helped the British contextualize their experience of Empire.
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Particularly important is the way the telegraph fed into these colonialist ideas of knitting the world together. Worth shows, for instance, that the idea of a “wired” world mediated by the telegraph was often used as a metaphor to understand British colonial hegemony.
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So, this is one way to understand, in my view, another dimension of the argument that science fiction and steampunk act as forms of what Joshua Tanenbaum, Karen Tanenbaum, and Ron Wakkary call a “design fiction.”
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The idea is that we need a methodology that moves from fiction to design to (digital humanities methodology?) and back again. In other words, the digital humanities can directly benefit from considering how technology is imagined in steampunk and science fiction – as well as considering the long critical scholarship already focusing on the political and cultural impact of technology. BTW, this is Josh Tanenbaum in his Captain Chromek outfit, which is pretty cool.
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Let me give you a couple of examples about how steampunk literature explores alternatives to this kind of technological colonialism. This is from Michael Moorcock’s A Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy, considered one of the first steampunk stories. So, the idea of the series is that Oswald Bastable – a member of the British Raj – is trapped in “the shifting tides of time.” The second book explores a world where most of American and Europe were devastated by a global war brought about by accelerated war machines being built in the nineteenth-century. Simultaneously, an inventor Manuel O’Bean invented machines “which would irrigate deserts, tame forests, and turn the whole world into an infinitely rich garden which would feed the hungry and thus extinguish what he believed to be the cause of human strife.” Political power is concentrated in South America and Africa instead of Europe and America – and you see many steampunk novels that experiment with what would happen if the industrial revolution happened in Africa, say, rather than Europe. So, you end up with this nation headed by Gandhi that basically buys out its colonial holdings.
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Moorcock’s trilogy is, of course, interesting – but still written from a Western viewpoint. More recent colonialist-inflected steampunk create even more interesting takes on technological development. This short story, appearing in the recent Steampunk World anthology explores a form of Indian technology relying on telekinesis that exists before European colonialization – built out of the Taj Mahal. The story ends up being a really interesting take on disability, in which a girl born without usable arms and legs uses her telekinesis to walk again. But this quote, with its interesting “perhaps” signifies (for me) the potential of postcolonial forms of alternate history.
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In fact, you find many of these alternate histories in Indian literature. This is an illustration from the Shakuna Vimana, a Sanskrit text written around 1920 by Pandit Subbaraya Shastry claiming that buildings mentioned in ancient Sanskrit epics were – in fact – ancient flying rockets. Now, obviously the planes aren’t aerodynamic enough to actually fly according to standard aviation principles, something scholars of the text actually admit. JH Hare of the “Internet Sacret Text Archive” says the following:
“In plain terms, the VS never directly explains how Vimanas get up in the air. The text is top-heavy with long lists of often bizarre ingredients used to construct various subsystems. … There is nothing here which Jules Verne couldn’t have dreamed up, no mention of exotic elements or advanced construction techniques. The 1923 technical illustration based on the text … are absurdly un-aerodynamic. They look like brutalist wedding cakes, with minarets, huge ornithopter wings and dinky propellers. In other words, they look like typical early 20th century fantasy flying machines with an Indian twist.”
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Along with the discussion of design fiction, I think we can interpret these forms of speculation along the lines of what Kari Kraus and her students call “reflective design.”
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The Shakuna Vimana and steampunk Indian literature work as “possibility spaces” for reflecting upon the potential of technological objects to envision alternate worlds.
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I think the focus on alternatives is extremely important, because much of the connection between steampunk and the maker movement is so invested in creating so-called “sustainable technology.” This is The Neverwas Haul, a three-story Victorian House on wheels that appears at Burning Man every year. It advertises itself as being constructed of 75% recycled materials. Of course, recycling is great – but I also think that steampunk can give visions of alternate worlds that can help us to tackle even more urgent matters. For example, the way that climate change will completely transform the planet. For me, this is yet another space where nineteenth-century digital humanities can impact political change in an urgently needed contemporary issue.
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In fact, if you look at the ambivalence of James Hutton – one of the founders of geology and theorizer of so-called “deep time” – you can a pivot point between theories of sustainability and the search for alternate or even non-human worlds. This is Hutton’s famous conclusion to Chapter 1 of Theory of the Earth, where he asserts the systematicity of erosion.
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Yet it was this very systematicity that gives Hutton insight into these strange non-human worlds, that have no discernable beginning or ending. Much of the first volume of Theory of the Earth is devoted to the strange marine creatures that Hutton finds amongst the fossils under his feet. Indeed, as several scholars have suggested, to confront the fossil means considering the material remains of extinct creatures who died millions of years before any of us were born.
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Knowing that this opening into the nonhuman is present even at the beginning of the nineteenth-century makes it all the more urgent to consider Jussi Parikka’s argument to consider the materiality of geology in the digital humanities.
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As we start to get serious about materiality, it’s also worth considering the ways digital technology warps our sense of time. This is one of the ways, I think, that steampunk can provide a powerful addendum to digital humanities discourses: in its anachronistic and alternate forms of temporality it models the warps of temporality found in digital media. Take, for instance, JJ Cohen’s lyrical description of lithic temporality:
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So, I find many of the models for this kind of discourse in so-called “weird fantasy steampunk” – like the novels of China Mieville, Felix Gilman, and Ekaternia Sedia. This is from Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, featuring a figure called the Construct Council: a heap of trash that has formed a hive-mind artificial intelligence and speaks with the help of an animated cyborg corpse.
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For me, this figure is a literary double of Hutton peering at the fossil and fearing extinction. Mieville helps us imagine a future where we are dead and used by non-humans, enfolded into their perceptions and used for their ends.
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I think you can see the same kind of “geological” recycled, yet alien conjectural aesthetics in a lot of really fascinating eco-art. This is, for instance, Claudio Garzon’s Plastikobots that he creates with floating trash he finds in the Pacific waters surrounding Los Angeles. Instead of recycling, we see repurposing with the intention of envisioning something odd and strange.
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Overall, I feel this combination of speculation, alternate history, and technical materiality give a very different way of both – as Bethany Nowviskie says “dwelling with extinction” and a different understanding of combatting the immateriality of cyberspace – as Steven Jones says here. By experimenting with new ways of building technologies informed by our critical traditions, we can connect the digital humanities to specific fields and show our colleagues how they can participate building a humanistic future for all of us.
Thank you.