Documentarity: History and Foundations of Information Science

Documentarity History and Foundations of Information Science Edited by Michael Buckland, Jonathan Furner, and Markus Krajewski Human Information Retrieval by Julian Warner Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548– 1929 by Markus Krajewski, translated by Peter Krapp Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss by Colin B. Burke Indexing it All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data by Ronald E. Day Bibliometrics and Research Evaluation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by Yves Gingras Search Foundations: Toward a Science of Technology- Mediated Experience by Sachi Arafat and Elham Ashoori The Information Manifold: A New Perspective on Algorithmic Bias, Fake News, and the False Hope That Computers Can Solve These Problems by Antonio Badia Documentarity: Evidence, Ontology, and Inscription by Ronald E. Day Documentarity Evidence, Ontology, and Inscription Ronald E. Day The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology This work is subject to a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. Subject to such license, all rights are reserved. Publication of this open monograph was the result of Indiana University’s partici- pation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries. TOME aims to expand the reach of long-form humanities and social science scholarship including digital scholarship. Addition- ally, the program looks to ensure the sustainability of university press monograph publishing by supporting the highest quality scholarship and promoting a new ecol- ogy of scholarly publishing in which authors’ institutions bear the publication costs. Funding from Indiana University made it possible to open this publication to the world. This book was set in Stone Serif and Stone Sans by Jen Jackowitz. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN: 978-0-262-04320-5 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Of would be a difficult person to like. — Carla Harryman, 1992 There are no fungibles in nature. — Rom Harré, 2018 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 The Philosophical Perspective 11 2 Documentarity in the Works of Paul Otlet and Georges Bataille: Two Competing Notions of “Document” and Evidence 37 3 Figuring Documentarity 51 4 Documentarity and the Modern Genre of “Literature” 65 5 Displaced Reference for Information: Jokes, Trauma, and Fables 99 6 Rights of Expression 111 7 Post- Documentation Technologies 137 Conclusion 151 Notes 153 References 161 Index 169 Acknowledgments I am very grateful to my editor at the MIT Press, Gita Devi Manaktala, for her support of this book, her patience with its extended writing time, and her superb choice of reviewers. And I am grateful for the anonymous reviewers of this book for their work; their insights and labor greatly assisted me over several revisions. Without them, this book would have been much less. I’d like to acknowledge Michael Buckland, Maurizio Ferraris, Geof- frey Bowker, and Johanna Drucker for their many years of research works and for conversations with them, which have greatly contributed to this project. In Michael’s case, I’d like to also thank him for reading the man- uscript in various stages, as well. I’d like to thank Neal Thomas for his insightful and learned works, which have helped me better understand “post- documentation” technologies. I’d like to thank Clovis Ricardo Mon- tenegro De Lima and Marcia Heloisa Tavares de Figueredo Lima for hosting me in Rio de Janeiro during several visits, which led to my discussion of the right to truth in chapter 6. I’d like to thank my family, Jiangmei Wu and Dexter Wu- Corts, and my friend Claire McInerney, for their personal support during the writing of this book, Dr. Scott Breeden for his friendship and keeping me fit during its composition, and Reine Melvin for her friendship and support while I researched Suzanne Briet’s works in Paris. The writing of this book was supported by small grants from the Asso- ciation for Information Science and Technology’s (ASIS&T) History and Foundations of Information Science special interest group and from the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics at Indiana University at Blooming- ton, for which I am grateful. This work was (partially) funded by the Office of the Vice Provost of Research and the IU Libraries. I’d like to thank the x Acknowledgments series editors, of which this book is a part, Michael Buckland, Jonathan Furner, and Markus Krajewski, for all their work and consideration of this text in their series. I’d like to thank Judith M. Feldmann of the MIT Press and Michael Goldstein for their production work and copyediting of this book. I’d like to thank the librarians at Indiana University at Bloomington libraries for the absolutely wonderful library they maintain, without which I could not have researched this book. And last, I would like to thank the readers of this book for taking time out of their lives in order to consider what I have written. Introduction I This book crosses philosophical ontology and documentary ontology, try- ing to understand different genres, technologies, modes of inscription, and innate powers of expression by which something comes to appearance as what is. Instead of approaching information ontologically (“what is information?”) it approaches ontology informationally, asking how something becomes evident and is taken as evidence of what is. It is a story of some of the inscriptional means for this, which will become clear by the end of the book, are not only information and knowledge technologies, but in the last resort, also technologies of judgment. What are judged are entities as to their identities, qualities, and actions, not just descriptively, but prescriptively. I call the philosophy of evidence “documentarity,” and I am interested in how this philosophy of evidence constitutes Western (cultural and disciplinary) philosophy as the Western metaphysical tradition,1 largely understood as a representational tradition in its epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, and politics. Documentarity is the philosophy of what comes into presence and makes itself evident, foremost in representation. The purpose of this book is to describe documentary evidence, and so, documentation, within a tradition of Western metaphysics, and so, largely, representation (though to do so I have traced the outer limits and contrary epistemologies and ontologies of such, as well). The study of documentarity is the study of technologies of judgment at the level of ontology— in this case, what and how what is appears to us as such. This book discusses the expression of beings or entities as evidence of what is, from ancient categories to medieval figures to modern documentation and modern literature to sublime and dispositional expressive powers, 2 Introduction and finally, to social networks and machine learning. Documentarity is the philosophical basis of the practice and theory of documentation; it is tra- ditionally understood as “representational” in various manners. Documen- tation is the foundation for much of what we call “information,” today, and its philosophical commitments shape our understanding of all manners of expression, from institutional documents to published opinion and even to literature and the other arts, too. Seen from a contemporary perspective, therefore, this is a book about information as truth and how this evolves within a tradition— documentation and its originary philosophy of documentarity— where truth is seen in the appearance of what is, through inscription, and foremost through, and as, representation. As I will show, the range of types, genres, and modes of evidence for what is varies across different discursive fields and seems to follow a general historical trajectory from Ancient works until today along a course from ideal reference (which I call “strong documentarity”) to phenomenological and linguistic sense (which I call “weak documentarity”). The transition from strong documentarity to weak documentarity traces the greater role that semiotic and empirical senses are given to creating and stabilizing reference. In strong documentarity, reference is seen as a product of categories (as in Plato’s philosophy, or in traditional documentation techniques). In weak documentarity (which may end up being strongly representational, however), empirical particulars play a stronger role, either as innate dispositional powers or through empirical research. This is a more Aristote- lian perspective, where categories of being are results of descriptions of the expressive powers of particulars. I hope that this book shows that there are not only theoretical concerns that belong to a philosophy of evidence, but also practical and political concerns and aesthetic forms of such. Documentarity and, today, “information,” have not only epistemic, but also political and aesthetic, qualities that should be taken account of. The philosophy of evidence not only governs knowledge institutions, but has also governed political institutions and has managed the role of knowledge in colonialism and the spread of “the West” and its notions of literacy and their importance. It has also col- ored the notion of what modern literature is (and more generally, the arts are) as realism and sometimes as formalism. “Information,” understood as a substantive, also has an aesthetic form, namely of organic representation. Introduction 3 Too little attention has been paid to the aesthetics of information, and how this involves epistemic and practical concerns. II This is my third book on information as metaphysics. In The Modern Inven- tion of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (2001), I looked at the then contemporary conception of information, within its twentieth- century Western European and North American contexts, as a trope for the metaphysical notion of “presence” (using this term in a Derridean sense).

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