Humanities Hub

(Director’s Note: Lee Morrissey, Founding Director of the Humanities Hub, joined the Clemson English faculty in 1995, moving to Clemson from Manhattan, where, while a graduate student, he had volunteered to create the Archives at an arts center, The Kitchen.  From 1995 to 2000, he brought artists–including Ben Neill (who performed with David Wojnarowicz in the 1989 event described below), Carl Stone, Pamela Z, Margaret Leng Tan, and Trimpin–to Clemson in a program he called “Technology and the Contemporary Arts.” This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

This summer, I will turn 56, which means, this summer in particular, I am well into what has been considered an elevated risk group for Covid 19.  But it also means, in my case, I am now living through the second plague outbreak of my lifetime.  There has been so much focus nationally on the Spanish flu of 1918, and other, earlier plagues, including the Black Death in Florence (see Boccaccio’s Decameron) and the bubonic plague in London (see Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year), but much less attention to the more recent experience of HIV/AIDS.  A recent article in the Washington Post reviewed how knowledge gained from HIV/AIDS research is helping with Covid-19 research, but considering that Anthony Fauci first came to national prominence in the 1980s’ AIDS crisis (making a frenemy of Larry Kramer in the process), you would think that there would be more attention paid to the last time around.

I’ve been wondering recently why AIDS isn’t more in the news, and I am starting to think it’s because it affected minority communities, and, unless you were traveling in those minoritized circles, well, you just did not really know.  I grew up in Boston, shared a radio show on WOMR-FM in Provincetown, MA in the summer of 1984, started graduate school in NYC in 1987, and volunteered, from 1987 to 1995 at The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, Dance, Performance, and Literature, creating and organizing their archives.   I traveled in those circles.  AIDS affected people I knew, early in the disease.  By the time I reached Manhattan, in a New York City that does not exist anymore (or, if enough people now move out, yet), AIDS was a defining feature of one of the things that used to attract people to New York: the arts.  The Aids Coalition to Unlock Power (ACT UP) was already active, with intense meetings at the Lesbian and Gay Men’s Community Services Center. Gran fury, an artists collective formed the year after I moved to the city, created one of The Kitchen’s monthly posters, with the words “art is not enough” taking the center—most—of the page.  I remember David Wojnarowicz at The Kitchen, all wiry energy backstage (well, upstairs) before his 1989 performance there, In the Shadow of Forward Motion, and, then, in the performance, realizing that it had the same wiry energy—David offstage had been, that night anyway, David onstage, which was part of his point: silence equaled death, and he was going speak volumes, producing all the time, constantly.  His self- portrait with flames coming out of his left side, the viewer’s right (pointedly highlighting the political mirror), turned out to be realism.  I was back home in Boston when news of Ethyl Eichleberger’s death reached me via the New York Times, and I won’t forget the frustration of trying to explain to my parents over breakfast why the loss of someone reimagining the Classics in drag and garish makeup, with self-consciously schlocky accordion songs, might matter to someone else studying literature in the same city.  I remember inviting everyone I knew well enough to see John Kelly’s 1991 event, Maybe it’s cold outside, because it nearly worldlessly told a life and death story of learning that one is HIV positive, with a soundtrack by Arvo Pärt.  Later that year, on World AIDS Day, A Day Without Art, The Kitchen assembled a broadcast, in part from the Kitchen, and in part from other arts organizations, mixing frank safe sex PSAs with artistic reflection on loss.  The standout, for me, was dancer Bill T. Jones, HIV-positive, and having outlived his partner, Arnie Zane, dancing toward his mother, Estelle, while she sang “Walk with me Lord.”

I left New York City, and moved to Clemson, SC, where I have lived practically ever since.  The metaphorical city I had left had, in many ways, died.  Actually died.  C. Carr wrote its eulogy in her book, On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century, whose last chapter is titled, “The Bohemian Diaspora.”  In Rent, which has a song called “La Vie Boheme,” Jonathan Larson memorialized it, and the gentrification pressures, which ended it (and on the morning of its first performance he passed away, too, from an undiagnosed aortic tear, not noticed in the several trips he made to his local hospitals, one of which has since been shut down).

There is another, much less well-known, and more abstract, long-form music and theatre piece from the era, Meredith Monk’s Book of Days (1989).  It opens in then-contemporary NYC, in color, as a construction crew blasts a hole in a wall, through which the camera travels, into a largely medieval village, complete with separate quarters for Christians and Jews, filmed largely in black and white.  As a plague breaks out.  There’s a documentary dimension, and contrasting musical and performance styles–martial and spectacular in the Christian white-wearing section, mystical and participatory in the Jewish section of town.   When, in this section, the plague arrives, in the figure of a lone dancer gesturing maniacally, the Christians amass and blame the Jews, despite the intervention of one man who tells them that “everyone is dying.”  A map of the town turns red as the deaths accumulate across its segregated quarters, and the sounds of the singers get more and more menacing.  As can be heard in this rendition of the song, we are listening to the plague itself: about two minutes in, out of those vocalizations, the chorus huffs “we know who you are; we know who you are; we know who you are; ha ha ha; ha ha ha.”  It is a chilling effect to have the plague emerge from the cacophony and claim us.  But that’s what happens.

In 1990, The Kitchen got caught up in the 1990 NEA defunding.  A decade earlier, as Bill T. Jones recounts in an essay he contributed to The Kitchen Turns 20, a book I edited on the occasion of the first two decades of The Kitchen, the US Information Agency had asked The Kitchen to select US artists to send to a cultural exchange in Bucharest, Romania.  But, now, after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War had ended and the so-called Culture War had broken out, at home.  The US is still living with the profound consequences of this redirection.  At the time of the NEA defundings, my father called, and said “I thought you were volunteering at a soup kitchen!”  Or, in other words, I guess, he was asking “what are you doing there?”  That’s a fine question, and I think the answer has to do with being interested in making meaning; the people, the artists, who performed at The Kitchen and other venues in New York, wanted to do something meaningful.  Like me, they came to New York from somewhere else with that hope.  They came from and spoke to overlapping communities, and they wanted to create something, usually ephemeral, filled with allusive, polyvalent, and, I think it’s important to note, embodied meaning.  Some of it, a really small number within it, left the performers vulnerable to charges of obscenity, but, ironically, usually in works which meant to raise questions about what else we live with, without considering it obscene.  All of this took place before the internet, before Ken Starr’s detailed report on President Clinton, and so might strike people today as quite tame.  They might also be struck by the convivial friendliness of the experiences in the audience at the time.  In the process, or processes, of creating their works these performers created new communities, sometimes as small as the seating at the original P.S. 122 (a former public school), or at the original Dixon Place (an apartment living room), but sometimes, as with Bill T. Jones, as big as everyone who’s seen any of his several Broadway choreographies.

Comparing then and now, a few things stand out.  First, I have not seen much emphasis recently on how fatal HIV was for that first couple of decades of the disease.  I think of it all the time now, in part because I saw so much loss at the time, but also because Covid-19 is so much more transmissible than HIV.  Imagine if the novel coronavirus were as fatal as AIDS.  Actually, don’t.  It’s too much to contemplate.  Second, in the early days with Covid 19, as doctors started to see patterns in who was most vulnerable to the virus, age, occupation, and then race were the initial factors.  Eventually, it became clear that other factors involved the status of one’s immune system, or “underlying health conditions,” and then it was reported that only 12% of the US population was metabolically healthy, meaning not obese, not diabetic, not with high blood pressure, etc.  It is as if 88% of the population has a different kind of acquired immune deficiency, related to diet (and access to healthy foods), environmental and living conditions (and access to places in which to exercise), and other cultural, meaning economic, meaning political, factors.  Third, HIV/AIDS is still with us.  Last year, 690,000 people died from AIDS, and 1.7 million people were infected, worldwide.  And, while there is PrEP if you think you are at high risk, there is, still, no vaccine, and no cure, yet.  In the US alone, according to the CDC, there were about 38,000 new HIV diagnoses in 2018, most of them in the South.

Fourth, thirty-five years ago, people who were affected by HIV/AIDS were frustrated by a President who would not mention the disease.  At the time, his political party was focused on family values and personal responsibility, which meant a disease cast as gay and preventable with celibacy (and safe sex) needn’t be a national issue, they thought.  Today, the president, of the same party, certainly talks about the current pandemic, but he has spent a lot of time saying that it will go away (it hasn’t yet, almost six months later), and that it is getting better (when it is getting worse).  And personal responsibility has devolved to NOT wearing protection, because, it is argued, nobody can tell another U.S. American how to do anything.  Four decades ago, conservatives blamed the sexual activities of gay people for spreading AIDS, mistakenly thinking it was a gay disease.  Today, as soon as the lockdowns are lifted, apparently heterosexual young people mingle in close proximity, close enough for this pandemic’s transmission–without wearing any protection.  In terms of disease transmission and prevention, they are acting as irresponsibly as Republicans used to allege gay people were, except this time, all they need to do for transmission is stand near each other, unmasked, in, say, a pool, while a beach ball bounces off their heads.

Finally, I think about how much changed in the US because of AIDS activism, a range of activisms.  By becoming experts in the disease—no one else would initially, so they did—activists changed healthcare.  By highlighting their exclusion from their partners’ hospital beds, activists pressed for recognizing lifelong commitments among lesbian and gay people, known today as gay marriage, and legal nationwide.  Most of all, though, because so many affected were artists, they could create verbal, visual, musical, and, in the end, emotional responses to living with or being stalked by the disease.  There was some hope, then, that there might be angels in America.  I can imagine the current Covid-19 pandemic–which is also creating the second great recession, or worse, in just 12 years–is going to have even bigger social consequences, and, I say hopefully, just as positive.  If so, though, we are going to have to do the imaginative work of the artists lost to AIDS to create affecting representations of living with and being stalked by both a disease and an economic collapse.  Gran fury said “Art is Not Enough,” but, actually, it is a start.

(Director’s note: Elizabeth Rivlin, teaches in the English department, and her research interests include the history of Shakespeare in American literature and culture, especially cultures of reading; theories of adaptation; and early modern drama and prose. Her current book project is titled Shakespeare and the American Middlebrow, for which she won a NEH Summer Stipend.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

With the stay-at-home orders that arrived in March came a slew of advice about what to do with all the unexpected, homebound leisure that some Americans found themselves with. Reading seemed to be high on the list, judging by a flurry of media pieces with titles like “The Lockdown List: Books to Read During Quarantine.” While some of the recommendations were for new and contemporary literature, the “classics” and “the great books” also had their cheerleaders. Take, for example, the well-publicized “Tolstoy Together,” a project in which the writer Yiyun Li read and discussed War and Peace, book club-style, with members of the public.

Shakespeare, too, has gotten love during the lockdowns. Patrick Stewart read the Sonnets aloud to us daily on Facebook, and, inspired by a Twitter meme claiming that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine for the plague, prominent Shakespeare scholars like Stephen Greenblatt, Emma Smith, and James Shapiro meditated on what Shakespeare has to tell us about being creative in or simply living through a pandemic. Others offered direct advice to help readers tackle Shakespeare. Acknowledging that “many people have said they find reading Shakespeare a bit daunting,” Emma Smith returned with “five tips for how to make it simpler and more pleasurable,” her last bit of counsel being “Don’t worry.” Allie Esiri recommended particular readings from Shakespeare for the lockdown period, on the theory that “Reading Shakespeare concentrates the mind which we are all in need of, lending both a challenge and a reward.” Meanwhile, in the conservative publication The Spectator, Chilton Williamson, Jr. guiltily confessed that “it is too easy to put off reading” Shakespeare and pledged to “rectify” that by putting The Complete Works of Shakespeare on his pandemic reading list.

This lockdown-inspired burst of enthusiasm for reading, and in particular for “classics” like Shakespeare, is just the latest manifestation of a persistent current in American life that has linked reading to a quest for self-improvement in which edification and pleasure are supposed ideally to mix. I’m working on a book, Shakespeare and the American Middlebrow: Reading Publics, 1878-Present, that looks closely at institutions that promoted the reading of Shakespeare with just such aims: Chautauqua is a small town in upstate New York that for several decades at the turn of the last century was the center of the burgeoning self-education movement in the United States; The Book-of-the-Month Club pioneered the mail-order sale of books at large scale in the early- to mid-twentieth century; and the Great Books Movement generated a list at mid-century of what it dubbed “the greatest books of the western tradition” and sold them to the American public in 54 volumes. All three of these institutions promised that learning to read books of a certain “quality” or canonical status would create individual mobility and collective uplift, and all three promised to help readers deal with the perceived difficulties and obstacles that accompanied this ambitious reading.

Arguably, no one entity today has the impact on Americans’ reading habits as these institutions did in their heyday (although Oprah’s Book Club has more recently enjoyed something of the same influence). Even on the diffused internet, however, many voices dispense familiar-sounding wisdom, especially the assurance that the reading of culturally sanctioned, esteemed works is therapeutic and even curative in a time of crisis. In this, they hearken back to earlier reading initiatives, for example, the Great Books Program, which in the midst of the Cold War promoted self-educational reading as a means for the American public to rise to the level of an enlightened democratic citizenry and thereby defeat the insidious threat of communism. The dangers may present themselves in different shapes in 2020, but the prescription remains the same.

One thing that does seem to be changing is Americans’ expanding sense of the kind of reading that can enlighten and improve: witness the recent outpouring of #BlackLivesMatter reading lists. When so much seems to fall outside of people’s control, the lure of reading, whether it’s James Baldwin, Shakespeare, or both, is still that the self can be improved, and that if progress is possible on a personal level, perhaps it can also be imagined on a collective scale.

(Director’s note: Jordan Frith, Pearce Professor of Professional Communication in English, researches mobile technologies, social media, and infrastructure, particularly where those topics intersect through questions of space and place. He’s the author of 30 peer-reviewed articles on these topics and three books, the most recent of which was published by MIT Press in 2019.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

Back in March when much of the world was starting to realize that the COVID-19 pandemic was not going to just disappear, various governments and corporations began exploring plans for digital contact tracing applications. Digital contact tracing involves using the data from mobile phones to track whom people come in contact with on a daily basis, so if someone is later diagnosed with COVID-19, anyone they shared a space with can quickly be notified. The apps mostly work through Bluetooth, meaning the phones of anyone who signed up for the contact tracing app would constantly broadcast a Bluetooth signal to nearby phones and record the unique ID of each phone within Bluetooth range. Those unique IDs would link to a database of users, which is how people would be notified if a positive COVID-19 case did occur.

With the COVID-19 outbreaks across the globe, digital contact tracing began being talked about as maybe the number one tool for containing outbreaks without going into full lockdown. A successful system would enable health officials to quickly identify case clusters and quarantine people who were at risk. And in a few cases, digital contact tracing has been useful, particularly in places like South Korea that put these plans into place early in the pandemic and got significant public buy-in. But many of the much-hyped digital contact tracing plans have mostly failed. For example, the UK digital contact tracing app has not made much of an impact, and the United States still does not have a robust Federal digital contact tracing system. So why have these systems not succeeded despite getting so much public attention? I argue that it’s partly because the plans relied too much upon data as a good in itself without the necessary critical reflection necessary for the success of most big data projects. That reflection and interrogation is where the humanities come in. As I explain below, the failure of digital contact tracing projects at the time we need them most shows why we need more data-literate humanists.

Digital contact tracing is obviously somewhat unique because it’s not every day we have a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. But the hype surrounding digital contact tracing is less unique when considered in the greater context of what has been called the “big data revolution.” The supposed big data revolution represents two major shifts in society in the 21^st century. The first is that we are producing far more data than ever before about everything from energy usage to mobility patterns. For some context, according to Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier, ‘‘Google processes more than 24 petabytes of data per day, a volume that is thousands of times the quantity of all printed material in the U.S. Library of Congress.’’ And that’s just Google. The second development is closely related. We now have vastly improved computing power necessary to process and act upon huge datasets. These two trends have combined to usher in an increased reliance on data in many walks of life, and according to some proponents, if people just collect enough data, the “data can speak for itself.” This blind belief in data without diving deeper into the unique contexts of data sources is part and parcel with the hype we saw about digital contact tracing.

There’s nothing wrong with the use of large-scale datasets to solve problems. Data informed decision making is often far superior to just winging it and guessing. However, the hype surrounded big data often went too far and did not involve humanists to ask questions about data projects that could have helped them succeed. After all, despite beliefs that data could supposedly speak for itself, that can simply never be the case. Data always needs to be interpreted to be acted upon. In addition, datasets are often a partial picture of a phenomenon, and data collection also often has privacy and personal liberty implications that are not closely enough considered. As Rob Kitchin argues, data projects are often best served by combinations of data scientists and humanists/social scientists who can interrogate the data and how it is used to inform decision making.

The COVID digital contact tracing is an important contemporary example of what critical, data-literate humanists can add to data projects. After all, these digital contact tracing apps, despite all their hype, faced some major issues from the very beginning that were not fully addressed. For one, as anthropologist Genevieve Bell argued, the design of these apps matters significantly for user privacy, and governments did not communicate design choices clearly to the public. The lack of explanation of where data was coming from and how it was stored likely hampered public adoption, and contact data is only useful when enough people buy into the system to provide a comprehensive dataset. Secondly, and maybe most importantly, the design choices in these apps were inherently exclusionary. They required mobile phone data (unlike focusing on a human-driven contact tracing system), so children, some elderly people, the homeless, and other non-adopters simply could not participate. In addition, many cheaper mobile phones do not have low-energy Bluetooth capabilities necessary for the applications. For people without the right devices, they are simply left out of the dataset, which can have major consequences for epidemiological tracking. And finally, digital contact tracing itself cannot work successfully without a rapid testing infrastructure to quickly identify positive cases, and—in my opinion—a social safety net that can financially support people staying home from work if they receive a notice they could be infected. Without these broader systems in place, the data provided through these systems and how actionable the alerts are was always going to be limited.

The issues in the previous paragraph have all limited the efficacy of digital contact tracing, and that’s not even mentioning the major surveillance concerns surrounding location data and whether systems are dismantled once (well, maybe if) the pandemic is under control. After all, Congress just renewed parts of the Patriot Act almost 20 years after it was first passed in the shadow of 9/11. But regardless, many of these issues could have been addressed through more critical engagement and less of a blind embrace of data. In other words, I argue part of the reasons these projects have not succeeded is that they often did not involve the necessary types of critical literacies that are the expertise of the humanities. By interrogating the plans for these datasets, issues of inequality, concerns about design and data storage, fears about surveillance, all could have been addressed from the start and communicated to the public. But instead, governments too often pushed forward with these plans without the types of critical analysis required to make them work.

In conclusion, I’m using digital contact tracing here as an example, but I could point to so many other data projects to make the same case. As humanists, we need to play a role in how data is collected and how data is interpreted. We also have to not be afraid of data. Humanists don’t have to be mathematicians or data scientists, but some of us need to know how to question datasets, how to explore where data comes from, and how to interrogate what it may be missing. And we need to move past antiquated quantitative/qualitative divides that act like numbers are outside the purview of the humanities. Most data projects aren’t going to have major public health consequences like a digital contact tracing app. But regardless, we need to fight for a place at the table for future data projects in both industry and government. We have a role to play to shape the collection and interpretation of data of various types.