David Golumbia
Virginia Commonwealth University, English, Faculty Member
The history of philology provides an exceptionally rich vein for locating what Derrida came to call deconstructions: nodes or pseudo-events in the development of discourse where it appears that foundations collapse, only to be rebuilt in... more
The history of philology provides an exceptionally rich vein for locating what Derrida came to call deconstructions: nodes or pseudo-events in the development of discourse where it appears that foundations collapse, only to be rebuilt in forms that may or may not have changed. The history of philology engages language, the sciences (especially evolutionary biology), and race, all of which are evidenced in the work of the German philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt. The relationships among these discourses have been repeatedly subject to deconstruction, sometimes so as to enhance appreciation of human diversity, and at other times against it. Understanding the history of philology is critical to understanding our present, but there remains significant work to do to reconstruct its liberatory aspects in the service of a more egalitarian future.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Philology, Cultural Studies, Philosophy Of Language, Historical Linguistics, and 10 moreRace and Racism, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction, Critical Race Theory, Enlightenment, Literary Theory, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, Jacques Derrida, Linguistics, and Wilhelm von Humboldt
The question of the militarization of language emerges from the politics surrounding cryptography, or the use of encryption in contemporary networked digital technology, and the intersection of encryption with the politics of language.... more
The question of the militarization of language emerges from the politics surrounding cryptography, or the use of encryption in contemporary networked digital technology, and the intersection of encryption with the politics of language. Ultimately, cryptographic politics aims to embody at a foundational level a theory of language that some recent philosophers, including Charles Taylor and Philip Pettit, locate partly in the writings of Thomas Hobbes. As in Hobbes's political theory, this theory of language is closely tied to the conception of political sovereignty as necessarily absolute and as the only available alternative to absolute sovereignty being a state of nature (or more accurately what Pettit 2008 calls a “second state of nature,” one in which language plays a key role). In that state of nature, the only possible political relation is what Hobbes calls a war of “all against all.” While Hobbes intended that image as a justification for the quasi-absolute power of the political sovereign, those who most vigorously pursue cryptographic politics appear bent on realizing it as a welcome sociopolitical goal. To reject that vision, we need to adopt a different picture of language and of sovereignty itself, a less individualistic picture that incorporates a more robust sense of shared and community responsibility and that entails serious questions about the political consequences of the cryptographic program.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Constitutional Law, Political Philosophy, New Media, Digital Humanities, and 28 moreInformation Security, Human Rights Law, Cybercrimes, International Law, Digital Media, Network Security, Hobbes, Political Science, First Amendment Law (USA), Anarchism, Ideology, Philosophy Of Law, Digital Media & Learning, Cyber Warfare, Freedom Of Expression, Cryptography, Anonymity, Ideology and Discourse Analysis, Encryption, Libertarianism, Freedom of Speech, Hacking, Ethical Hacking, Right-Wing Extremism, Anarcho-capitalism, Cyber Security, Arms Control and Disarmament, and Infosec
Open Access (OA) is the movement to make academic research available without charge, typically via digital networks. Like many cyberlibertarian causes OA is roundly celebrated by advocates from across the political spectrum. Yet like many... more
Open Access (OA) is the movement to make academic research available without charge, typically via digital networks. Like many cyberlibertarian causes OA is roundly celebrated by advocates from across the political spectrum. Yet like many of those causes, OA's lack of clear grounding in an identifiable political framework means that it may well not only fail to serve the political goals of some of its supporters, and may in fact work against them. In particular, OA is difficult to reconcile with Marxist accounts of labor, and on its face appears not to advance but to actively mitigate against achievement of Marxist goals for the emancipation of labor. In part this stems from a widespread misunderstanding of Marx's own attitude toward intellectual work, which to Marx was not categorically different from other forms of labor, though was in danger of becoming so precisely through the denial of the value of the end products of intellectual work. This dynamic is particularly visible in the humanities, where OA advocacy routinely includes disparagement of academic labor, and of the value produced by that labor.
Research Interests: Labor Economics, New Media, Digital Humanities, Marxism, Open Access, and 15 moreOpen Access Publishing, Digital Media, Political Science, Open Source Software, Ideology, Digital Culture, Copyright, Immaterial Labour, Labor History and Studies, Digital Theory and Culture, Free Culture, Digital Library, Autonomist Marxism, Copyright Law, and Cyberlibertarian
Almost from its inception, one of the most notable features of Noam Chomsky’s “revolution in linguistics” has been his insistence that linguistics, or at least the most interesting and important aspects of linguistics, must be understood... more
Almost from its inception, one of the most notable features of Noam Chomsky’s “revolution in linguistics” has been his insistence that linguistics, or at least the most interesting and important aspects of linguistics, must be understood as a part of natural science. Its status as natural science is frequently posited as a critical distinction between Chomskyan linguistics and all (or almost all) other approaches to the subject. While much attention has been directed to the way Chomsky’s definitions of language and linguistics structure his research program, Chomsky’s conception of science has been subject to much less scrutiny, and turns out to be both very specific and controversial. Chomskyan science rules out, rather than in, many practices associated with contemporary scientific investigation, particularly direct empirical investigation of ordinary social and mental phenomena. Instead, Chomsky has long explicitly endorsed what he calls “Cartesian rationalism,” a view that proceeds from just those Aristotelian precepts to which modern science is typically understood to have developed in opposition. Chomsky’s project resembles and in many ways follows in lock-step that of Edmund Husserl, the first major figure to discuss “universal grammar” and to name it as such; while Chomsky rarely discusses Husserl, Chomsky’s attempts to erect a science by ruling out metaphysics are notably Husserlian, in that they continually return to metaphysical propositions that are not recognized as such, and in that this continual return in the name of science is typically marked by the name of Descartes.
Research Interests: History of Linguistics, Cultural Studies, Philosophy of Science, Languages and Linguistics, Poststructuralism, and 14 moreHistory of Science, Deconstruction, Language Evolution, Literary Theory, Edmund Husserl, Jacques Derrida, Linguistics, Linguistic Theory, Biolinguistics, Descartes, Poststructuralist Theory, Noam Chomsky, Generative linguistics, and Chomsky
The theoretical movements known as Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology depend on the “critique of correlationism” offered by the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in his 2009 After Finitude. There Meillassoux claims to... more
The theoretical movements known as Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology depend on the “critique of correlationism” offered by the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in his 2009 After Finitude. There Meillassoux claims to have shown that Kant and all philosophers following him committed a grave and unseen philosophical error that he calls “correlationism,” in failing to see that humans can have access to absolute knowledge. Meillassoux’s demonstration fails to deliver on this promise by equivocating on just the key argumentative points that philosophers from Kant onward have worked to clarify with precise language and argument, and by ignoring tremendous amounts of countervailing textual evidence. Far from blindly committing the correlationist “error,” much of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy takes the issues Meillasoux raises as central ones for any philosophical investigation, with a significant number of philosophers and theorists adopting the realist position Meillassoux claims has been eliminated.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Metaphysics, Analytic Philosophy, Epistemology, History of Analytic Philosophy, and 14 morePhilosophy Of Mathematics, Idealism, Continental Philosophy, Literary Theory, Hilary Putnam, Speculative Realism, Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, Alain Badiou, Object Oriented Ontology, Realism vs Anti-Realism, Continental (vs.) Analytical Philosophy, Quentin Meillassoux, and Realism
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In 2003, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published Death of a Discipline, an exhortation to create “an inclusive comparative literature,” one that “takes the languages of the Southern Hemisphere as active cultural media rather than as objects... more
In 2003, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published Death of a Discipline, an exhortation to create “an inclusive comparative literature,” one that “takes the languages of the Southern Hemisphere as active cultural media rather than as objects of cultural study.” To many literary scholars such a development seemed welcome and even likely. Instead, ten years later, an entirely different transformation has taken place via the development of the Digital Humanities (DH), in which the close study of literature and the languages in which it is embedded have themselves been demoted, in favor of “distant reading” and other forms of quantitative and large-scale analyses, and whose language politics have regressed rather than progressed from the state Spivak described. DH advertises itself as an unexceptionable application of computational techniques to literary scholarship, yet its advent has accompanied an almost complete reorientation of literary studies as a field—a virtual death of the vision described by Spivak. The advent of DH is quite unlike the ones accompanying the introduction of computers into other disciplines, whose basic precepts have remained largely intact in the face of digitization. DH’s paradoxical use of the adjective “digital” to describe only a fraction of research methods that engage with digital technology creates a tension that must be resolved: either by the DH label being reabsorbed into literary studies, or by literary scholarship itself being fundamentally altered, a goal which DH has already in part achieved.
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Despite the proliferation of critical studies of communication, the meanings of the words “communication” and “critical” remain deeply contested. Attending to the history of the use of these terms inside and outside of the academy offers... more
Despite the proliferation of critical studies of communication, the meanings of the words “communication” and “critical” remain deeply contested. Attending to the history of the use of these terms inside and outside of the academy offers a broader perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting scholars of communication today.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Information Technology, Kant, Communication, and 13 moreTechnology, New Media, Languages and Linguistics, Social Networks, Film Theory, Research Methodology, Higher Education, Digital Media, Cultural Theory, Literary Theory, Social Media, Immanuel Kant, and Harold Innis
The development of High-Frequency Trading (HFT)—automated trading of stocks, as well as bonds, options, and other investment instruments—provides a signal example of the political effects of computerization on a discrete social sphere.... more
The development of High-Frequency Trading (HFT)—automated trading of stocks, as well as bonds, options, and other investment instruments—provides a signal example of the political effects of computerization on a discrete social sphere. Despite the widespread rhetoric that computerization inherently democratizes, the consequences of the introduction of HFT are widely acknowledged to be new concentrations of wealth and power, opacity rather than transparency of information flows, and structural resistance to democratic oversight and control. Even as computerized tools undoubtedly provide individual investors with more power relative to what they had before, they also provide powerful actors with relatively more power as well, in some cases effectively excluding the majority of individuals from insight or meaningful participation whatsoever, especially with regard to the political impacts of market activities. Reports on recent financial crises, and the 2011 film Margin Call provide narrow windows into the operations of HFT and the challenges it poses to democracy; these in turn raise significant problems for the view that computerization inherently democratizes.
Research Interests: Finance, Cultural Studies, Algorithms, High Performance Computing, Financial Economics, and 37 moreCommunication, Media Studies, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies, Journalism, Film Studies, Securities Law, Digital Media, Development communication, Cultural Theory, Democratization, Politics, Media Education, Securitization, Digital Culture, Banking, Media Literacy, Social Media, Media and Democracy, Facebook, Media, Online Journalism, International Finance, Google, Youtube, Financial Derivatives, Media Research, Digital Marketing, Social Communication, Media Impact and Effects and Usages, Digital Story Telling, Iphones, Asset and investment valuation, HFT, Paywalls, Virtual Revolution, and Alternate Media
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Game studies, Media Studies, New Media, and 18 moreMedia and Cultural Studies, Play, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Theory, Deconstruction, Video Games, Critical Race Theory, Race and Ethnicity, Software Studies, Literary Theory, Jacques Derrida, Postcolonial Theory, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Games (Computer Science), Post-Structuralism, MMORPG, Gayatri Spivak, and Wow
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Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Cognitive Science, Gender Studies, Philosophy of Mind, Technoculture, and 17 moreEthnography, Digital Media, Computational Intelligence, Cultural Theory, Cognition, Phenomenology, Video Games, Digital Culture, Gender, Martin Heidegger, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, New Media Studies, Everyday Life, Alan Turing, Turing Test, Computationalism, and Microethology
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Languages, Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis, Humanities Computing (Digital Humanities), and 62 moreGender Studies, Philosophy Of Language, Communication, Indigenous Studies, Indigenous or Aboriginal Studies, Media Studies, New Media, Media and Cultural Studies, Intellectual Property, Digital Humanities, Languages and Linguistics, Web Design, Literature, Innovation statistics, Postcolonial Studies, Digital Media, Media History, Experimental Media Arts, Subjectivities, Multimedia, Textual Scholarship, Textual Criticism, Cultural Theory, Deconstruction, Identity (Culture), XML, Race and Ethnicity, Endangered Languages, Politics, Identity politics, Web Technologies, Gender, Literary Theory, Web Development, Indigenous Knowledge, Post-Colonialism, Jacques Derrida, Media, Postcolonial Theory, Technological Innovation, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Linguistics, Postcolonial Literature, Hypertext theory, Semantic Web, Text And Image, Experimental Literature, Multimodality, Walter Ong, Hypertext Fiction, Experimental Film, Paul Virilio, CSS, Jean-François Lyotard, John Cage, jQuery, Scripting, Net.art, WebGL, Javascript, HTML, and Experimental Scholarship
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, New Media, Marxism, Internet Studies, and 24 moreDigital Media, XML, Capitalism, Tcp/Ip, Postmodernism, Jacques Derrida, Facebook, Hypertext theory, Online Journalism, Freedom of Information, Cyberspace, CSS, Google, Youtube, jQuery, Commerce, WebGL, Javascript, Digital Marketing, HTML, Digital Story Telling, Iphones, Paywalls, and Virtual Revolution
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Manipulations of reality and appearance are surely the most prominent formal devices in Philip K. Dick's science fiction. Critical writing on Dick's novels is extensive, and some of the best of it offers... more
Manipulations of reality and appearance are surely the most prominent formal devices in Philip K. Dick's science fiction. Critical writing on Dick's novels is extensive, and some of the best of it offers important insights into these manipulations. Nevertheless, the critical literature ...
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... I benefited greatly in preparing this essay for publication from long-past, fondly remembered, and intense conversations with Lyall H. Powers ... Aware and Richly Responsible,'" especially in the first of these, wherein... more
... I benefited greatly in preparing this essay for publication from long-past, fondly remembered, and intense conversations with Lyall H. Powers ... Aware and Richly Responsible,'" especially in the first of these, wherein Nussbaum argues that the reader should view Maggie as a ...