April 6th, 2011 / 11:48 am
Snippets
Snippets
Mike Young—
Yet even the most explicitly political acts of data gathering and collecting, like WikiLeaks, can succumb to a contemporary ideology of the self-sufficiency of information.
yesterday david keppel was on a radio station here in Bloomington, IN talking about the proposed legislation to repeal (forever) the clean air act, pretty much guaranteeing (according to keppel) that the epa would never, ever be able to place sanctions on coal companies or (i guess) any of the companies enabling our downward spiral into ehd (Eternal Hot December). he was also talking about duke energy of IN, our major electricity company, and how they pretty much lied and, despite contrary EVIDENCE, got away with their lies. It’s terrifying.
it has seemed to me for awhile, but especially since a friend of mine started running for city council in my home town, that what is needed is for the individual, humble, dedicated haves to go out and to talk, and to insist on open dialogue, and to share the information they have. We have to believe that if the average person has the information, s/he will let it influence his/her decision.
yesterday david keppel was on a radio station here in Bloomington, IN talking about the proposed legislation to repeal (forever) the clean air act, pretty much guaranteeing (according to keppel) that the epa would never, ever be able to place sanctions on coal companies or (i guess) any of the companies enabling our downward spiral into ehd (Eternal Hot December). he was also talking about duke energy of IN, our major electricity company, and how they pretty much lied and, despite contrary EVIDENCE, got away with their lies. It’s terrifying.
it has seemed to me for awhile, but especially since a friend of mine started running for city council in my home town, that what is needed is for the individual, humble, dedicated haves to go out and to talk, and to insist on open dialogue, and to share the information they have. We have to believe that if the average person has the information, s/he will let it influence his/her decision.
jtc, what do you think of this n+1 essay’s assertion that just having the info isn’t enough?
jtc, what do you think of this n+1 essay’s assertion that just having the info isn’t enough?
Who is we, in addition to “the editors”??
There are plenty of progressives – every one I’ve ever heard/read – who do have “much sense what to do with” the real-world facts that conservetards don’t or pretend not to believe.
“The editors” talk of “the evolution of a style that resembles ‘information for information’s sake'” in “literary nonfiction” – which style it seems they’ve found in . . . wikipedia??? Is this online encyclopaedia the first encyclopaedia “the editors” have ever heard of? – dictionaries? atlases? tables of contents? indices? individual maps? page numbers? – really – never heard of any of them?
(“The editors” pull up two recent books that “the editors” fear don’t tell their readers what to do with the information in them. I’ve haven’t read it, but that’s not what I’ve heard about Moby Duck. I don’t think I’ve ever read a piece of “literary nonfiction” that seemed to me to have been written with a commitment to “information for information’s sake” and an “absence […] of anything resembling argumentation” – in the manner that an encyclopaedia might (in my view: in error) be supposed to have been.)
“The editors” characterize this “evolution” as “information for information’s sake becom[ing] information for art’s sake” – which can be seen to some degree in Melville and to a greater degree (?) in Sebald and DeLillo. That is, DeLillo is telling his readers facts without telling those readers what to do. In a sense, that’s not true; DeLillo is compelling his readers to feel and think in the shapes of what DeLillo has written: precisely aesthetic instruction. And, in a sense, it is true – in the sense that it’s true of Shakespeare, Dante, Virgil, Sophocles, Homer — why, Western civ is full of these damn artists who make you feel and think somewhat left to your own devices!
Mike, who is it that “the editors” are arguing against? – who argues that just having info is enough?? Do “the editors” really want Don DeLillo to tell them how to live and what to do – or even what to think about his own books???
You make convincing arguments and criticisms of this essay, deadgod. For me, the essay wasn’t so much about progressives who themselves don’t know what to do, but the idea of sharing what we know. It speaks to the idea jtc talks about below, which is something I definitely see a lot, somewhat hazily paraphrased as “if we just give “everybody” the facts and have an open dialogue with all the info out in the open, they’ll know what to do.” E.g. that chart floating around comparing all the proposed GOP budget cuts to what could be saved if megacorps actually paid taxes, etc. The chart “speaks for itself.” But what do you do once you see that chart? Who do you call? Whose house do you burn down? Where do we send our apple basket? Who do we hug? Who do we shoot? I haven’t read Moby Duck yet either, but About a Mountain definitely conveys the frustrating bewilderment of knowing everything there is to possibly know (plus the paradoxical obvious impossibility of same) about “something” (Yucca Mountain, suicide, “I knew her books her cars her clothes” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_MBQDyUw0g]) but having the “something” still elude us. Raising issues of form, what a something is to be held, or understood, held in the mind, seen for what it is, seen for how it fits, etc. ec.
Also I’m pretty sure these editors know about the encyclopedia as a storied genre. I read the wiki nods as speaking to a particularly contemporary evolution of the -pedia as a collaborative digital text, this nobly ultra-democratized living document thing, where the end goal is the idea that if everybody knows what they know all together at once, in this supposedly all bets off pirate ocean of digital space, the world will start singing or something.
I like the idea behind “DeLillo is compelling his readers to feel and think in the shapes of what DeLillo has written: precisely aesthetic instruction.” But I’m not sure “instruction” is the right word; I’d call it more inhabitance. And to me the idea this essay speaks to—and especially the D’Agata book—is what do we do once we have the keys to the house of truth and we start living in it.
I read About A Mountain last fall and thought it was remarkable, but I think that book speaks more to our human inability to process very large numbers and a vague dread/nihilism/ennui(?) that results in being exposed to them. The argument that we have too much info and don’t know what to do with it is an indictment of our schooling and I don’t see what it has to do with that book. Nowadays we’re taught in school according to business axioms of quantification and production, we’re not taught methods that help us analyze and synthesize the information we have. Unsurprisingly, Americans (of which I am one) are increasingly terrible at maths and sciences, so that the facts we have are merely facts. If we understood applications, then this wouldn’t be a problem. Now, maybe the essay approaches this later, but I only read what was available for free online and that idea is never broached.
Looking at this differently, Conservatives, particularly religious ones, aren’t swayed by a rational relationship with factual information, they’re swayed by faith (and, often, have their faith bolstered when they’re shown their empirically wrong about something). Perhaps the essay should have addressed that fact.
I was a bit offended when the essay’s author called these “informational” books mandarin texts and seemed to write them off because of it. Just because I have access to facts, etc. and I’m not out doing something about some vague “it” makes me lazy. It doesn’t make the authors of these texts villains or this some new, insidious intellectual style. Actually, it made me interested to read Moby-Duck.
Alex, I experienced something very similar in my reading of About a Mountain, except my vague dread/despair came from not just being exposed to large numbers but large quantities of numbers—literally numbers of numbers, or large numbers of choices in any systems of conveyance, or large (or small) numbers of the right questions to ask someone who wants to die, etc.
I think you’re right on when you say “Nowadays we’re taught in school according to business axioms of quantification and production, we’re not taught methods that help us analyze and synthesize the information we have.” Eerily I was talking about this exact thing—like, almost exactly saying what you said, except less eloquently—yesterday in a conversation with someone frustrated by how even very well-educated people sometimes don’t know how to interpret scientific studies.
I think the difference suggested “we create our own reality” and “we try to figure out what reality is” implicitly includes issues of faith, but I see what you mean about it being a hairier ballgame than the essay wants to play.
I also see the bit you’re talking about when you mention being offended: “These are “Mandarin” texts, in the sense that they are written for the enjoyment of a certain group of people expected to appreciate the artfulness of the collected information, and breathe a quiet sigh of despair at a form achieving its natural limits. They flatter the education of their readers, who are expected to draw the right conclusions from all those ducks in a row.” You’re right that’s too scornful, but I guess I glossed the offensive implications because I was more interested in the argument that such texts are symptoms (not architects; victims not villains) of a larger cultural bewilderment. I guess I didn’t feel offended because I do acutely feel that frustrated and overwhelmed bewilderment.
One interesting, sort of random thing to bring in from the D’Agata about this: all those people he talks to, who is willing to talk to him versus who isn’t. The legwork of talking he does. The rejection of the Douglas Couplandy “who needs interviews when you have Google” attitude. I’m not quite sure how it connects, but I feel like there’s something to be included here about what a good ear D’Agata has and what a hungry gabber he is.
Yes, the attitude of ‘facts speak for themselves’ is a great mistake – nothing that someone in particular says is ‘speaking for itself’! It’s important (politically and in everyday life) to understand that info that’s presented to you is guided towards you and (would-be) guiding of you.
It’s also true that Chomsky’s attitude – for example – that data which represents reality will, in its unaffected presentation, make reality visible — that’s a false hope. Context, for example, frequently needs to be made explicit, as does – even more often – the causal connectivity of some particular datum. That’s not so hard if one wants to ridicule social-con geology: ‘fossils were put into the dirt to test your faith’ – to believe this is to deny the unity and coherence of the same scientificity that supports the capacity of a dental X-ray to reveal the teeth in your head. But in the case of fiscal-con mathematics, there’s a sometimes more abstruse explanation that’s needed to make sound in a skeptical mind the idea that ‘all opportunity and prosperity in America depends on the thorough socialization of investment that one takes for granted in everyday life’.
Sure, the sheer amount of information to process in the case of nuclear power is intimidating and frustrating, but, to me, the essay seemed to be asking to be told what to think and to do about, say, planning for the next 100 years of energy consumption — but, you know, one has to start somewhere, and to have and defend a point of view, even taking into account that one’s knowledge is incomplete and one’s interests are sometimes unknown and always in conflict with each other.
I don’t doubt that the writers of the essay know these things, but it does seem like they’re grumbling about a good thing – publicly accessible information – and wishing they had a Bad Thing Indeed – a user’s manual that would take away from them the privilege of thinking for themselves.