The Obligation to Instruct

It fascinated me, when reading the Raley piece, how much an analysis of the connection between dataveillance and countervailance could end up reading like an article on digital lifehacks. This is especially true if you peruse the endnotes.

“Search engines that allow one to surf anonymously, most of which neither record IP addresses nor use identifying cookies, include Scroogle, Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, and Yauba. Another way to prevent search leakage is to use network routing software like Tor, an ‘infomediary’ that encrypts traffic between the individual user and the Tor network. More simply, encrypted search (HTTPS, or HTTP secure) does not send search terms.” (Raley 139, endnote 1)

Raley not only gives us a historical and technical study of data mining and the complexities of voluntary and involuntary self-identification through data, but also a how-to manual for our own searching needs. It extends beyond current tech knowledge, too—Raley offers us a “letters from the front” kind of view by adding in personal experience (e.g. “my Firefox add-on, Collusion, reminds me…” Raley 129).

This dovetails pretty interestingly with the Scholes article and his claims about the privileging of certain kinds of work. He also mentions toward the end that we (or students in general) “need both knowledge and skill,” and that the two cannot exist independently of each other (Scholes 16). It’s telling, I think, that Scholes argued for a rebuilding of our academic structure “with the consumption and production of texts thoroughly integrated” in 1985, and by the Raley article in 2013 that kind of tangled up work system almost doesn’t warrant a second glance.

If we think of “production” work as Scholes does—his diagram puts creative writing and composition in that category—it’s possible to deal with privacy as part of that category (i.e. the production of privacy, especially in a non-private environment like the data clouds). What Raley does, then, is combine the “consumption” work of reading and interpreting current data structures with the insistent production of privacy via the sharing of tips and tricks from someone in the know. It’s “teaching literature” and “studying texts” (Scholes 16).

I’d like to look briefly at this phenomenon on the level of genre as well. Scholes calls genre a “network of codes that can be inferred from a set of related texts. A genre is as real as a language and exerts similar pressures through its network of codes, meeting similar instances of stolid conformity and playful challenge” (Scholes 2).

My text, Woman on the Edge of Time, wouldn’t meet a lot of contest being marketed as science fiction, which indicates to me that there are certain aspects of the book that unequivocally code it as part of the genre. In reading the Raley, however, and reading in it the way Scholes’ arguments have by that time become a kind of ingrained impulse to teach and study simultaneously, it occurs to me that when we establish a genre we’re actually entering into a production-consumption loop. For example, if I call Woman science fiction, I’m marking it out as part of a network based on something immanent in the content or form. I can only accomplish this consumption work of genre-marking, however, because the text is somehow producing science fiction. Because science fiction is a deeply ambiguous genre and a lot of its constitutive elements depend on the person defining it, I am also producing Woman as science fiction by consuming it as such. In labeling Woman on the Edge of Time “science fiction” in interpretations and criticism, I am in effect teaching the concept and parameters of the genre. I am including this data point in the literature of science fiction at the same time that I am studying the text as a point already in that generic network.

Thus, the problem. Scholes sets up the production/consumption binary as something that should not be an opposition, and claims we need to let them integrate into a “rebuilt apparatus” in order for literary criticism to survive (Scholes 16). I’m not sure I’m convinced it’s possible to not do that in some way. The Raley article is a fairly distinct example (how do you talk about the impossibility of privacy without talking about the software designed to asymptotically approach privacy?) but it seems to me that, at least in criticism like genre studies that involves “coded” texts, we can’t separate production and consumption into any kind of binary, let alone the false one Scholes thinks we use. The integration is crucial for the categorization of texts (or possibly even movements, periods of social history, etc.), so much so that we’re almost obligated to “teach literature” while “studying texts.” There’s no pause or hiccup in the Raley article between analyzing data and offering privacy tips because there’s really no other way to accomplish the overall task.