Scholars,intellectuals,and bricoleurs

The scholar

In The Ideal of the University, Wolff (1969) notes that the norms and style of the scholar have historical roots in three periods. First are the scholarly interpretations of Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic religious texts in the ancient and medieval world. Second, he adds the study of religious texts during the Renaissance of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Third is the Italian Renaissance in which scholars, poets, and artists rediscovered Roman and Greek literature. During this period secular literature replaced sacred literature.

Wolff states that ‘this tradition is the intellectual heritage of Western man. The fundamental purpose of a college education is to initiate the student into the dialogue, acquaint him with the great ideas in these various literary embodiments, and develop that sensitivity and responsiveness which will allow him to share the tradition with fellow initiates’ (Wolff, 1969: 6). What is established is a community of scholars that locate scholarly activity in the detailed reading of texts. The ideal of scholarship results in an undergraduate curriculum in which the Western cultural tradition becomes the subject of study. The canon is not only the texts defined by a community of scholars as central to participation in the civilizing project but also the texts that when engaged produce a refined and sophisticated subject. With the rise of multiculturalism and postcolonialism the canon expanded to include non-Western national and indigenous arts and literatures. The Humanities defined from the point of view of the West were no longer limited to its own tradition.

The scholar is associated with the Humanities. In Fellow Teachers, Rieff writes that ‘as teachers in the humane studies, our sacred world must be the book. No, not the book: the page. We teachers are the people of the page – and not only of a page of words but of numbers and of notes’ (Rieff, 1973: 2). Scholarly activity constantly excavates looking for complexity and nuance in its interpretations. It takes time; it aims to be exhaustive. Deep readings necessitate autonomous space separated from the distractions of the everyday.

With the expansion of the multiversity and the growing pervasiveness of media culture, critics increasingly pointed to a growing disparity between the ideal of scholarship and actual practices within academia. Conservative critics decry the loss of the scholarly tradition, which they associate with the breakdown of traditional authority. Lasch notes students’ ‘diminished store of their knowledge about the cultural traditions they are supposed to inherit biblical references, which formerly penetrated deep into everyday awareness, have become incomprehensible, and the same thing is now happening to the literature and mythology of antiquity – indeed, to the entire literary tradition of the West’ (Lasch, 1979: 260–261). Ten years later arguing for Great Books as the central component for a Liberal Arts education, Bloom advocates ‘just reading them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of approaching them – not forcing them into categories we make up, not treating them as historical products, but trying to read them as their authors wished them to be read’ (Bloom, 1987: 344). This position privileges the text. It stresses deep reading and discerning interpretation. Bloom’s critique, however, goes well beyond academia and extends to the culture itself. It is a desperate call to save what has been commodified, mediated, fragmented and bastardized. He positions a Liberal Arts education as necessary to restoring legitimate culture. Although this appears as a rearguard action bordering on the nostalgic, it offers an alternative to market-driven cultural formations. Ironically, mastering the ‘Great Book’ once associated with cultural hegemony, is now positioned as a counter-hegemonic position.

Critics on the left also construct commodity culture as pervasive and detrimental to the educational enterprise. Postman (1985) in Entertaining Ourselves to Death argues that media culture operates on the super-ideology of reducing all experiences to an entertainment format that promotes superficiality, infantilism, and regression. Likewise, Aronowitz and Giroux (1991) argue that students’ ability to think critically, abstractly, and metaphorically has been ‘stultified’ by media culture. These were not new criticisms. We just have to think of Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1982 [1947]) work on mass culture. But now for educators the enemy is amongst us, invading, penetrating, and undermining the scholarly enterprise from within academia itself.

Throughout the 1990s the construction of students as immersed in commodified culture served to justify a call for accountability. ‘Upholding standards’ became the 1990s’ catch phrase for a strategy designed to attack motivational apathy, the need to be continuously entertained, and the inability to develop the skills to compete in the global economy. A rhetoric of rigor dominated pedagogical discourses during this period (Nelson, 2011). Reacting to the perceived slippage in the ideal of scholarship within the academy, this rhetoric served as a defensive discourse. Now the debates in the nineties on rigor and pedagogy have been replaced with calls for accountability and assessment as the academy begins a new battle against a technological environment which not only includes the maturation of mass media but also new informational forms: the Internet, social media, and gaming.

Although a difficult orientation to maintain, the scholarly is still nostalgically celebrated as the ideal pedagogical model. And, although the scholarly might not be rewarded economically, it still has high sign value and prestige. The traditional conception of the scholar offered by Reiff, Bloom, and Lasch has morphed into the productive scholar. Since the advent of the personal computer, the expectations for both faculty and students are of high levels of scholarly production. Moreover, production legitimizes both the academy and its disciplines. Liberal arts colleges now emphasize student work with testaments to student scholarship on university websites, Festivals of Scholarship to celebrate good research projects, and student panels and poster session events, a presentation format copied from the sciences. The scholar remains an ideal for the Liberal Arts. But is there a difference between producing a scholarly paper and developing a scholarly worldview? Is the scholarly being reduced to specific practices, i.e. good research skills?

The Digital Humanities find themselves at this nexus. Keep in mind that the Digital Humanities do not imply a monolithic perspective. Sprawling across disciplines, practices, and schools of thought, any discussion, critique, or support of the Digital Humanities must be directed at specific practices (Parker 2012; Presner et al., 2009). For example, The Golden Notebook project in which seven readers provide a close reading through annotations of Lessing’s text and offer a response forum for those annotations extends the interpretative tradition of the scholar (Alderman et al., 2008). The close readings draw on different theoretical positions: feminism, psychoanalysis, etc. which are integrated into a poststructural position extending the text outward not only by multiple readings, but also by producing a chain of readings. Close readings extend traditional interpretative practices of the traditional scholar into the electronic information environment, which facilitates simultaneous readings and responses by producing a virtual conversation.

Drawing from corporate communication and software design models, collaborative online projects and forums have exploded in the Digital Humanities. For example HASTAC and in Media Res provide online spaces for the presentation of scholarly work. HASTAC is open to anyone who wants to join the discussion on the humanities and technology. In Media Res publishes work on weekly themes. The topic this week was Laura Croft: Tomb Raider. Interdisciplinary in nature, these forums provide more formal spaces than listserves but less gated spaces than academic journals for scholars to present work and to stimulate discussion of common themes. Electronic production and digital distribution have expanded the conception of scholarship from an individualistic interpretative act to ongoing participation in a virtual community and from a canonical core to an amorphous periphery. Moreover, this conception of the scholar demands high rates of production and response.

Cohen’s (2010) often-cited research in which he applies a text mining program to 1,681,161 books of the Victorian Age offers another form of digital scholarship. Supported by a Google humanities grant he looked at how many times certain words such as revolution, scientific, industrial, religion, Middle Ages, etc. appeared in the title of these books. By graphing the results over the time period he discerns trends or spikes in the appearance of these terms and thus a better understanding of the Victorian Age. There is nothing new here. Sociology has used quantitative content analysis for over 50 years. What is different here is the size of the sample and the ease with which computing can generate data. Also important is the nature of the encounter. Think of historical classics like Hobsbawn’s The Age of Revolutions, Mathieu’s The French Revolution, Marx’s Communist Manifesto or even a philosophical essay like Camus’ The Rebel. Revolution in Cohen’s project is just a word, a piece of information that repeats itself. I am not arguing that generating data is not a significant research practice. Good information is a useful component for contextualizing a reading. By graphing these frequencies across the Victorian Age Cohen produces a visual understanding of the statistical ebbs and flows of ‘revolution.’ Data mining excavates recurring structures or at least metonyms of those structures (Craig, 2004). Based on a computational analysis, data mining is a methods-driven search for a measurable relationship between variables. The scholar lies at the edge of this methodological procedure in the act of interpretation, how meaning is given to the results. If interpretation does not transcend facticity, the research is reduced to abstracted empiricism. This is not a critique of the inadequacy of Cohen’s research, nor is it to suggest that the university not reward such research with tenure or promotion (a concern expressed in almost every Digital Humanities anthology and well-argued by Fitzpatrick (2011) in Planned Obsolescence). But it does not fall into the traditional conception of the scholar, in which interpretation is the primary activity.

Noting that the sheer number of literary publications make the canon not only insignificant, but also impossible to read enough of to represent the whole in any area, Wilkens supports this form of research. He states that ‘we need to do less close reading and more of anything and everything else that might help us extract information from and about texts as indicators of large cultural issues. That includes bibliometrics and book historical work, data mining and quantitative text analysis, economic study of the book trade and of other cultural industries, geospatial analysis, and so on’ (Wilkens, 2012: 251). His conclusions not only highlight the research agenda of this school within the Digital Humanities, but also downgrade the interpretative tradition, a position that often reappears within Digital Humanities’ discussions.

Parker (2003) distinguishes between transformative and goal-oriented activity. She notes a shift toward the latter as the academy responds to pressure from outside stakeholders, such as the government and corporations. Often the shift is a response to demands for assessment and accountability based on market criteria. She suggests that the Humanities often succumb to these pressures either as a response to the anxiety of losing ground in a market economy or to a need to feel valuable within institutional settings. Research whether by faculty or students functions to add value to the department within the institution and meet the demands of assessment, while legitimizing the Liberal Arts and Humanities in a utility-based environment. Research does not necessarily produce a scholarly orientation. The Liberal Arts certainly supports both, but it is the latter that is more amorphous. It doesn’t easily lend itself to assessment. As faculty, we recognize our peers who are scholars, a quality that does not necessarily correlate with publication records. Anyone who has sat on a tenure and promotion committee has engaged in that debate. Although Parker’s notion of transformative activity does not preclude scholarly work, disciplinary specialization even in the Arts and Humanities does not necessarily produce the non-measurable qualities associated with the Humanities: reflexively engaging with complexity, singularity, and ambiguity in relation to both Self and Other. Although the Digital Humanities open up troves of material, information and venues for connection and collaboration, they do not ensure the transformative.

The intellectual

The Western intellectual tradition emerges out of the Enlightenment and the dislocations created by the three revolutions that surround it. The theories and methodologies of the scientific revolution not only redefined the nature of the physical universe but also undermined the religious worldview that shrouded agrarian society for centuries. The industrial revolution unleashed the forces of capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization. The French Revolution marked the end of traditional political authority. These transformations were both liberating and destructive. On the one hand, individual rights, the concept of the citizen, were now anchored in a conception of the state legitimized by the will of an electorate. On the other hand, changing economic relationships meant that individuals increasingly had to confront a social world defined by the logic of capital. Berman aptly states, ‘to be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know everything we are’ (Berman, 1982: 15). Out of these social upheavals modernity was born. And so was the intellectual. Feeling out of place in a world confronted by paradox and contradiction the modern intellectual emerges. His role is to engage these contradictions and theoretically make sense out of them.

Marx epitomizes the modern intellectual. Not only does he provide a description of the intellectual as an active social agent, and develop the categories of ideology, alienation and praxis, but also he himself is a model of an intellectual driven to analysis by the recognition of alienation, injustice, exploitation and human suffering. The intellectual is motivated by the contradiction between existence and possibility, between ‘the is’ and ‘the ought’ (Marcuse, 1965). The source of knowledge is engagement itself, or the desire to collapse these categories. The modern view of the world presumes the possibility of progress, a belief that social and technological changes lead to ever greater economic plenty, justice and the development of each individual’s potential. It is out of the tension between utopian possibility and the nature of everyday social existence that intellectual alienation is born.

Deriving power from alienation, the intellectual orientation privileges marginalization. Its source can be anywhere: race, class, gender, age, the colonial experience, personal trauma, or even a psychological pathology. The intellectual is ‘in a state of never being fully adjusted’ (Said, 1994: 53). Academia can promote an understanding of an intellectual tradition but it does not necessarily provide the fuel for intellectual motivation. Intellectuality exists on institutional peripheries. Although the scholarly is built into the curriculum, the intellectual is not. Institutions by their very nature are conservative and tend to quiet alienated intellectuality. Estrangement from institutions, real or perceived, generates the uneasiness, the tension necessary for an intellectual engagement with the world. Moreover, the intellectual’s quest for a utopian social world is also a quest for authenticity: the production of a unified self. The intellectual orientation emerges on the margins, in the crevices, along fault lines of cultural contradictions that often subliminally move until they erupt.

The production of the intellectual orientation splits into two positions. Overlapping with the scholarly, it refers to participation in multicultural intellectual traditions by in-depth encounters with literature and the arts as well as social theory, philosophy, history, and psychoanalysis. For Parker (2008) the Humanities are the core of a scholarly or intellectual orientation. She stresses that the Humanities’ willingness to employ multiple epistemological perspectives, as well as foreground issues of interculturality, ethnicity and identity, positions them as necessary for critically engaging with global complexity. In Not for Profit, Nussbaum (2010) echoes Parker’s position. She also privileges the Humanities as the foundation for an intellectual life. For her the three pillars of this orientation include Socratic argument, diversity, and narrative imagination. Together they support critical thinking and empathetic understanding necessary for an informed, moral global citizenry. Not only do the Humanities provide an avenue for self-exploration but also the possibility for empathetic understanding of others who occupy radically different socio-historical places. Both Parker and Nussbaum position the Humanities in terms of their positive social functions. However, there is also a dark side to intellectualism. The Humanities also articulate the horror of the human condition. As the Liberal Arts and the Humanities experience threat, their defense is organized around their utility in engaging with the social world, not for promoting an intellectualism that spirals into desperation, futility, emptiness and nihilism.

A second perspective is found in Gramsci’s (1992) distinction between the traditional and the organic intellectual. On the one hand, embedded in institutions such as the media, the educational system and the state, the traditional intellectual serves the ruling class. Reproducing cultural hegemony the traditional intellectual functions to solidify his position on top of the social hierarchy. Claiming legitimacy the traditional intellectual disempowers the working class. On the other hand, the organic intellectual arises out of the materiality of social life. It is the dialectic between the experience of inequality and the articulation of it that generates an intellectual life. Likewise Said calls for an amateurism ‘fuelled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish, narrow specialization’ (Said, 1994: 82). Expressing concerns that the intellectual is easily coopted into reproducing hegemonic discourses, Said also argues that professionalism is the enemy of intellectualism. Speaking in discourses that are linguistically closed and excessively complex, the intellectual orientation can easily degenerate into elitism and narcissistic self-promotion, a regular target in Woody Allen films.

Gramsci’s position is extended in the critical pedagogy of Freire (1974). Here the distinction between those with power and those without (oppressor/oppressed, teacher/student) frame the production and sharing of knowledge. Emphasis falls on dismantling this distinction found in pedagogical assumptions and practices. Giroux (2009) carries on this tradition with a radical critique of the university. Driven by the processes of vocationalism, market instrumentalism, conservatism, and student consumerism, the institution of the university itself reinforces anti-intellectual tendencies. Critical pedagogy is practiced as a form of resistance to dominant institutional practices. Giroux’s critical pedagogy relies heavily on the interpretative skills of the Humanities but refocuses them on the critical reading of texts and discourses that promote cultural hegemony (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991; see Silberman-Keller et al., 2008).

Is there a place for this orientation within the confines of the academy? What degree of intellectuality do we expect from our students? Allied with corporation and the state, the American university has always exhibited a career-oriented pragmatism and a grant funded research agenda. Although Liberal Arts colleges celebrate, perhaps even sanctify, the scholarly mode, alienated intellectuality has little cachet as a marketing brand. Producing disaffected intellectuals is not a selling proposition. Ironically, as teachers of the Liberal Arts we deeply desire our students to have the restlessness, passion and engagement associated with an intellectual life, but more often than not the student-intellectual appears as an anomaly, something produced in the cracks.

Paradoxically, although the Internet provides a space for the organic intellectual to speak, Digital Humanities appear to have little use for the intellectual. The term rarely appears in their discussions. More often the critique from this perspective is directed at the concept of ‘the Author.’ The attack on authorship is two-pronged. First, it draws on the postmodern position that creativity and originality cannot be linked to a single person. Fitzpatrick (2011) highlights the poststructuralist and collaborative tendencies in the Digital Humanities. Authors remix. The text is an intertext or a hypertext or just a never-ending process. The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 proclaims, ‘process is the new god; not product’ (Presner et al., 2009). Second, this position associates the privileging of single authorship with narcissism and elitism, producing status hierarchies and resultant social isolation (Singletary, 2012). Often the notion of the Author is presented as the antithesis of the democratic nature of listserves. If there is a single characteristic that flows across the big tent of the Digital Humanities, it is a call for collaboration and community enhanced by the power of social media. Intelligence is defined as a collective entity spread across the web and inhabiting the electronic network.

Ramsay and Rockwell posit an even more radical position. They note the time-saving possibilities of computer-generated analysis while simultaneously implying that an analysis from an intellectual perspective based on deep reading is simply time wasting. They note that ‘reading Foucault and applying his theoretical framework can take months or years of application. A web-based text analysis could apply its theoretical position in seconds. In fact, commercial analytical tools like Topicmarks tell you how much time you saved as compared to having to read the primary text’ (Ramsay and Rockwell, 2012: 79). They capture the problem with reading theory as well as literature. They both take time.

Writers on the Digital Humanities almost celebrate the a-theoretical. In his essay ‘Has Critical Theory Run out of Time for Data-Driven Scholarship?,’ Hall (2012) argues that the scientific turn in the Humanities is a ‘repudiation of criticality’ as well a response to the lack of confidence in what we do. Proclaiming the post-theoretical age Hall argues that the computational turn relegates theory both historically (the time for theory is over) and methodologically (method has replaced theory). If there is a possibility for theory, it lies in the future. Perhaps the decline of Critical Theory and the rise of the Digital Humanities are both the consequence of the rise of conservatism, the expansion of technologism, and the permeation of capital into the structure of the university. Even Liu (2011, 2012) cautiously reminds us of the current inadequacy of the Digital Humanities to engage with larger social and cultural issues. Self-estrangement and alienation, which so deeply undergird the category of the intellectual, have not yet found roots in the Digital Humanities.

The bricoleur

For Levi Strauss the bricoleur is someone who works with his hands and uses “devious means” to produce an object, a man who does odd jobs, a jack-of-all-trades. Levi Strauss compares the bricoleur to the engineer. He notes that although the bricoleur can carry out a variety of tasks, the engineer subordinates tasks to the availability of specific tools or the proper raw materials.

It might be said that the engineer questions the universe, while the ‘bricoleur’ addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavours, that is, only a sub-set of the culture … . The engineer is always trying to make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization while the ‘bricoleur’ by inclination or necessity always remains within them. This is another way of saying that the engineer works by means of concepts and the ‘bricoleur’ by means of signs. (Levi-Strauss, 1966: 19–20)

On the one hand, our students are certainly more adept bricoleurs than we are. They are creative assemblers. They learn by appropriating culture, dismantling and putting it back together. Jenkins et al. (2006) note that teens are comfortable sampling, ripping, mashing, and remixing as well as multitasking. Holman (2010) reports that students often don’t have sophisticated mental models of information systems, don’t operate linearly but learn and search by discovery, and operate at a rapid pace. Consequently, many students forego library research for the efficiency of web-based research. Ease of access is the primary criterion given by students in research searches (Van Scoyoc and Cason, 2006). Students draw heavily from the non-academic public domain. Unconcerned with authoritativeness they often rely on the ease of skimming the surface of whatever results a search engine produces (Dahl, 2009). Bricolage makes sense to the time strapped student facing a paper deadline. The efficient bricoleur browses and instantaneously weeds out the useless. How long does it take you to scan a web page before you recognize that it has no utility? How often are you one click away from a successful search? Efficiency is a function of speed, the time it takes to solve a specific problem. The slow deliberate style of the scholar is out of sync with the flows of contemporary life.

Although the scholar and the intellectual are the authoritative models in academia, the bricoleur is more adept at handling the information environment. Depth models are too slow. In a fluid informational environment, multi-tasking, identifying useful pieces of information quickly, and then molding them into a finished product are skills that transfer to high tech business environments. Ad hoc problem-solving groups often resort to the same skills. Likewise virtual sociality establishes networks necessary for any organizational work. The scholar and the intellectual almost seem like dislocated dinosaurs in a world of hypertexts, blogs, and YouTube videos. In Liberal Arts at the Brink, Victor Ferrall (2011) argues that high school students often view Liberal Arts as simply more of the same and certainly not worth investment of time and money. That there exists a core of knowledge worth knowing appears to make little sense. The role of the Humanities to preserve and pass down this core appears to be weakening.

Historically, the arts and literature have employed a range of bricolage practices: collage, homage, pastiche, parody, montage and now sampling and mashing. Often these forms were heralded as revolutionary, producing not only new perceptual realities but also liberated social ones (Dyer, 2007). Bricolage allows for a creative playfulness. Through incongruous juxtaposition it constantly extends itself beyond boundaries. Loose allusions open up channels of interpretation limited by more rigorous analysis. Historically, we have evaluated the practices of bricolage on whether or not they produce unified narratives or are grounded in theoretical connective tissue. Perhaps it is not the act of bricolage that is an issue, but whether or not the bricoleur has the intellectual depth to produce a meaningful sophisticated whole. Think of Godard’s heavily allusive work. Or the insignificant historical moments that Foucault weaves together to form his lucid analyses. Now, however, the ease and speed at which cultural material can be gathered, connected and stitched together raise evaluative concerns. We recognize a slippage in scholarly work and respond with calls for information literacy or add multiple layers of assessment onto pedagogy. Even our obsessiveness with demanding peer-reviewed work is an attempt to rein in the unreflective bricoleur.

The bricoleur is at home in postmodernity. Although the beginnings of postmodernity are obscure and often traced back to specific historic events: the Holocaust, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the rise of Stalin, the Vietnam War, and the resultant disillusionment with Enlightenment narratives, it is the material base which mixes high speed information technologies, flexible accumulation, neo-liberal capitalism, and the global cultural economy that underpins the postmodern condition. Postmodernity refers to a specific historical epoch in which signs, the raw material of culture (knowledge production) such as images, sounds, words, video clips and artifacts and the meanings associated with them, are freed from their socio-historical referent systems and circulate at ever increasing velocities through our lives. The accelerated circulation of signs is a consequence of both communication and information technology advances that continue to explode onto the socio-cultural landscape. Driven by the logic of capital, the faster commodity signs circulate, the more profits are to be made. To stand still is to be rendered obsolete by competitors. As the half-life of commodity signs continually shrinks, new ones instantly appear and vie for our attention. The logic of capital drives technological development and in the long run will determine the shape of the information system (Harvey, 1989). Signs are dislodged from their organic roots and enter the global cultural economy as commodity signs governed by the logic of the market and the logic of the spectacle. Moreover, multimodal texts are commonplace demanding ever shifting attention targeting. Web pages mix media as attention-capturing devices. Consequently, popularity curves often define what information is both readily available and consumed (Stefik, 2011). Bricolage is simply a functional response to a new cultural formation in which signs are separated from a referent system (de-contextualization), are accelerated through electronic circuits at ever increasing velocities, and are fractured and fragmented giving culture the semblance of incoherence. The bricoleur stands on the edge of this cultural flow, skimming off fragments and re-assembling them in a new form.

In this accelerated flow of texts, to capture our attention it is necessary for each text to be more spectacular than previous ones. The ever changing superlative reigns as the pre-eminent cultural form. Here, as Baudrillard (1983) notes, fascination replaces meaning. Competing with mass media, music and video downloads, the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter, is a daunting task. Where does literature fit in this information-soaked environment? In this age of distraction what happens to the slow-read of a demanding text?

Critiques of the effects of media culture, such as infantilization and commodification, are not new. Perhaps postmodern theory’s representation of present-day cultural formations as composed of fragmented, decontextualized signifiers best captures their ability to annihilate an intellectual life. Social media contribute to the unending flows of information, producing what the ad industry referred to as clutter. Perhaps it is not the specific content of a medium but that we live interrupted lives that make the depth models of the scholar and the intellectual difficult to achieve and maintain. In his essay “The End of Solitude,” Deresiewicz (2009) notes that we are seeing the merging of two cultural formations. The first, associated with the camera, produced the cult of the celebrity. The second, a consequence of the computer, created the cult of connectiveness. Together these produce an intense loneliness expressed as a fear of being anonymous. Not only does one have to be connected to virtual sociality, but one also has to be constantly transmitting information about self, no matter how banal, via social media. In this world of audio-visual chatter there is no place for solitude. Deresiewicz contends that reading is an act of solitude, a necessary act to develop an informed citizenship. But he also notes that students have no desire for solitude; it cannot compete with the lure of a constantly mediated reality. Not to be connected to the media streams, both social and mass, that define one’s reference group is to risk marginalization and anonymity. Bricolage is not just assembling material but also always having one’s antennae up, searching for new material, gathering fragments or pieces of texts. It is a demanding never-ending task essential for identity formation (Jameson, 1991). Bricolage is neither simply a form of inquiry, nor a production practice, it is the primary orientation we use to shape our world-view, an orientation that was so adroitly captured by Delillo (1985) in his novel White Noise.

Responding to bricolage

Liberal Arts and the Humanities are caught in a quandary. How ought academia respond to the pervasive use of bricolage not only as a form of inquiry but also as an orientation that overwhelmingly affects identity formation? How much redesigning of the curriculum and our pedagogies is necessary to respond to the changing cultural landscape? How do we get our students to read in a world of distraction? How do we engage students so that they have both the skills to compete as well as the sensibilities of the scholar/intellectual? How do we develop “narrative imagination” in our students who seem to read so literally? Does engagement in the Arts and Humanities produce better critical thinkers or is that a myth we use to support our status in academia?

I would like to mention three responses from academia to the pervasiveness of bricolage as a research practice. First is the promotion of literacies, a.k.a. skilling. By literacy I do not mean reading. Literacy here refers to developing a set of skills for retrieving, processing, and presenting information. There is quantitative literacy, research literacy, technological literacy, information literacy, visual literacy, media literacy, and even artifactual literacy. These have been added to writing and rhetoric as essential skills needed to be acquired by undergraduates. Sometimes they are termed critical literacies adding rhetorical value to this pedagogical strategy. Berry argues that the digital turn makes sense for the postmodern university, noting informational and digital literacies as essential. He even suggests a “computational or data driven subject,” a “computational agent” (Berry, 2012: 9).

These new literacies (skills) are essential for participating in the contemporary occupational environment. Not surprising the literacy model is more often than not motivated by the corporate need to produce an efficient workforce, expressed by the ongoing LEAP initiative (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2012). Literacies are often de-intellectualized to fit programmatic teaching, i.e. first year programs. Here, the expectation is that components or percentages of courses include a composite of literacies. Often these literacies are de-theorized, watered down and taught as a form of general education. The institutional shift from a content driven to a skill driven pedagogical model makes sense in a fractured information environment in which hierarchies of cultural knowledge have seemingly collapsed. Because these literacies are designed for negotiating a fluid information environment, which often demands instantaneous responses, they also reinforce bricolage as mode of inquiry.

A second response is the instrumentalization of both curriculum and pedagogy by increasing the presence of disciplinary practices. This is achieved by standardizing knowledge sets and pedagogies. Textbook teaching, on-line courses, virtual lecturing, reading guides, and pre-packaged courses appear to be proportionately increasing. The use of these pedagogical products tends to be associated with disciplines, particularly the sciences, which clearly define and hierarchize content. For example, Innovating Pedagogy 2012 , an Open University Innovation Report, is written by academics from educational technology and mathematics. As a response to two primary failures of pedagogy: ‘that schools, colleges and universities are attempting to teach knowledge and skills for jobs that no longer exist, and that teachers are not fully involved in educational innovation and curriculum development’ (Innovating Pedagogy, 2012: 7), they propose ten innovative pedagogical tactics drawing heavily on educational technology. Overwhelmingly, these tactics are designed to promote narrowly defined information environments, “structured learning and formative assessment” (Innovating Pedagogy, 2012: 3). This is not to say that within this package of tactics, there is no opportunity for deep readings and engagement with the texts of the Arts and Humanities. Nevertheless, STEM models are now driving pedagogy and appear to be drifting into the Humanities. Ironically, while the skilling of students is a highly regarded academic goal, there appears to be de-skilling of faculty in which intellectual autonomy is being undermined by standardized pedagogical packets that only need to be administered, e.g. APLIA, a software package used to teach economics.

In the name of accountability, both administrative and self-imposed assessment are applied at every level. Teaching evaluations continue to be modified increasing the detail of surveillance. Likewise, disciplinary assessment has expanded and has become increasingly panoptic. Although Liberal Arts colleges have been traditionally resistant to the objectification of the pedagogical moment, now administrators, supported by assessment consultants and coopted faculty committees, proclaim its importance in producing desirable “student learning outcomes” (Ford, 2010). Foucault’s proclamation that we are entering “the age of infinite examination and compulsory objectification” (Foucault, 1979: 189) appears to be roaring through academia. As cultural formations are chaotically exploding outward, social institutions (in this case academia) are subject to increased rationalization. In the cultural realm everything is possible and everything is permissible; in the institutional order activity is placed under surveillance and control. Perhaps out of this contradiction we shall see new forms of intellectualism.

Third, the growth of Digital Humanities is also a response to this changing information environment. On the one hand, it embraces the tactics of bricolage: remixing, sampling, modular writing, multiple never-ending contributions to the formation of a text, the use of mix media, the role of design. Bricolage represents a poststructural openness. The Digital Humanities Manifesto celebrates what Fitzpatrick terms multimodal production. “Digital Humanities doesn’t preclude one or the other flavor of scholarship. It accommodates both. But by emphasizing design, multimediality, and the experiential, it seeks to expand the compass of the affective range to which scholarship can aspire” (Presner et al., 2009). Bricolage, as a mode of inquiry and a production practice, correlates neatly with the power of the digital to reproduce, de-contextualize, and remix into new forms.

On the other hand, the archival practices of the Digital Humanities attempt to organize the chaotic flow of information by producing metadata, categorization, and electronic collections. The archive not only produces access but also meaning. It fences information into logical categories. New software programs such as Zotero allow users better to organize research. Likewise, cultural mapping, an essential function for the Digital Humanities, organizes a disorderly universe by purging unwanted elements and placing desired elements in socially constructed categories. Perhaps the loose associations of bricolage are representative of the infant stage of this new information environment, to be replaced by more manageable organizational forms.

My argument is that the social technological forces that now produce the bricoleur also produce the tactics and strategies that attempt to rein bricolage in and bring it under institutional control. The unruly cultural formations that necessitate bricolage are countered with institutional strategies that refocus education on skilling, employ more sophisticated forms of surveillance supported by detailed assessment of both students and faculty, and implement narrowly defined curricular hierarchies in pre-packaged formats. As academia becomes increasingly susceptible to market forces, tendencies toward goal-directed activities and assessment will continue to strengthen. Measurement promotes standardization, reductionism, objectification, and administrative control. Ironically, the technological progressivism associated with the Digital Humanities may also support and disguise these dystopian tendencies. The Digital Humanities offer opportunities not only for the development of colloquial, dialogic and communal forms but also for intellectually reductive strategies powered by educational technology.