Derision Does Not Equal Theory
At the enjoyable, smartly written theory blog Antigram, Daniel has posted a new commentary by Jacques-Alain Miller (one of the executors of Jacques Lacan’s estate) on Google. Here’s an excerpt:
Google serves a meta-function: that of knowing what there is to know.
Our query is without syntax, minimal to the extreme; one click… and bingo! It is a cascade – the stark white of the query page is suddenly covered in words. The void flips into plenitude, concision to verbosity. Every hit a winner.
Organising the Great Enormity, Google follows a totalitarian maxim: voracious and all-consuming.
For several days now, I’ve been thinking about the fact that contemporary social and political philosophy risks becoming vapid and ineffectual, if it is written from within that erudite dream that makes things effortlessly conform to its own post-Marxist despair. Much contemporary critique has done nothing to affect political rhetoric, organizing tactics, or party politics. It should be that effective: political philosophy is not art, and does not have the same claim to a useful indirection.
Consider these statements, for example. While people do look to Google for information, it doesn’t always serve the function of “knowing what there is to know.” We’ve all had the experience of searching fruitlessly for something via Google, perhaps something we knew was out there: every hit is not a winner. Furthermore, the burden of knowledge (even on a symbolic level) is shared by sites like Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database.
“Our query is without syntax.” No, it’s not. It depends on the query. I write queries that have syntax (e.g. phrases) all the time.
“The stark white of the query page is suddenly covered in words.” That depends on where you’re searching from. Lots of times I will use the Google box in the top right of my browser, which means that the screen’s already covered in words.
“All-consuming.” Google mirrors; it caches. It does not consume in any useful sense.
One may, instinctively, still feel that somehow Miller is right, in general if not in the particulars. Somehow his tone of derision, his disillusionment, his sense of aggrieved assault, all refer back to something real, and Google is part of that something.
Doubtless. But we can’t achieve change by summoning miasmas.
His statement is not really apolitical so much as a defense of privilege. Tools like Google allow a radical distribution of the ability to search; what was previously only possible to archivists or to upper-middle-class and well educated people is now possible to anyone with an Internet connection. His statement is not recognizeably Marxist, since any Marxist would presumably be in favor of changes in conditions of production that reduce class privilege; then again, post-Marxist despair is not really Marxist except insofar as it insists on its own knowing coolness, a sort of holdover from some minor aspects of cultural Marxism.
By the way, I recently had a work incident in which the indexing of governmental data on Google led directly to examination of these data (which had not previously taken place while the data were “available” but unindexed), which lead to news stories which in turn may have some political effect. Google-indexing is not glamorous, but is in itself inherently a sort of political tactic.
That is completely right; in the interest of brevity, I confined my comments to a series of negations, but plenty could be said about the political value of Google to those of us on the left, it’s potential as a democratic tool. (Tempered by such things as their willingness to censor themselves for China.)
The level on which I think Miller is basically right is that to some extent, Google “knows on our behalf.”
In a variety of different settings, I have seen people arguing about some empirical point, then someone suggests looking it up on Google — but no one looks it up. They’re just satisfied that it is look-up-able, that it’s “known” in the abstract. Wikipedia fulfills a similar function, and it’s closely tied to Google insofar as most searches (at least simple ones) will have a Wikipedia entry on the first page. Of course, I don’t hold old French guys to a very high standard as far as detailed knowledge of the Internet goes — I’m actually impressed by his description (which is admittedly wrong in many details).
The reason I focused on the details so obsessively has to do with the difference between telling a story, in which case everything he said could apply, and writing philosophy as a sort of inarguable general case in the form of a narrative. Whenever a philosopher does that, I get the distinct impression that they just want to make my experience identical with theirs, whereas simply interpreting their experience would have been enough.
PS. I think what we are saying here is that what Google knows, what it truly consumes, are those pieces of knowledge that we don’t actually want to know, hence we don’t bother looking them up. To which I say, carry on, brave Google. You’re like that tree where people would whisper their prayers and then cover the wish up with hard clay. Except instead of swallowing prayers, you’re swallowing the name of that movie with Benicio del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones. Which I think was The Hunted. But I’m just…not…sure.
I’m actually waiting, while I type this, for a list of a few million URLs of pollution and hazardous waste records to be produced by a program that works against some governmental databases. When the list is done, I’m going to submit it to Google, so that Google will know how to find and index those records in the database. Each of those records is individually “knowledge that you don’t actually want to know” for the vast majority of people. But together, they mean a certain degree of activity.
I expect many clueless letters to be sent from corporate counsel saying that the group that I’m doing this for is misrepresenting them, and many calls from people who want to know what it means, and a couple of calls from reporters, and finally I expect that it may affect pending legislation, indirectly.
Even more broadly, though, the concept of “knowledge that you don’t want to know” just as well applies to any library or archive.