Rhetoric of the Technological Sublime-Debunking Commonplace-Book Entry of the Week

“It is a remarkable apparatus, said the Officer to the Explorer …”: File under “Technology evangelism as portrayed in the great books of world literature.” Source:  IHUM Project on German  Violence and Pacificism, Stanford U.

Item: The New York Review of Books: Clifford Geertz, Life Among the Anthros

We are entering, we are told, a weightless, frictionless, speed-of-light age in which we will all be but address nodes in an endless flow of information packets, scurrying message handlers continuously assaulted from all directions. So far as scholarly life is concerned, that is still more specter than reality; promises (or threats) of e-books and downloadable doctoral theses and flooded-over inboxes aside, communication still proceeds at a more or less human pace, in a more or less politic manner. However, to judge from the on-line blizzard of charge and countercharge that has attended the mere rumor of Patrick Tierney’s blistering indictment of anthropological practice in the Venezuelan Amazon, Darkness in El Dorado, it may not do so very much longer. Such established academic customs as looking into books before reviewing them, editing drafts before publishing them, and couching even polemic in consecutive argument may well be on the way out — runes and relics of a less hurried time. In cyberspace, it is velocity that matters. Velocity and volume.

All those quaint traditions that the Intel-inside revolution will sweep aside into the dust-heap of history.

And that is all you get for free from the NYRB.

But it is a damned good start. And I may be able to get some more fair use out of the BPL databases, which after all, my freaking property taxes pay for, whether my meatspace ass is bedded down there at the moment or not.

As a passionate comparative interdisciplinary research methodology and adminstrative governance geek and phreak, of course, I have to disclose to you that I have read the recently deceased Prof. Geertz thoroughly and often — though not often enough lately — and tend to be deeply persuaded and heavily influenced by what he has to say. 

To which the Fox NEWS anchor will no doubt reply, “See! He actually reads and admits to liking the guy’s books! He’s biased!”

For notes on a related commonplace book entry, from Kafka, Franz, In the Penal Colony (1919), see this prior post.