Kelley Walker wrote:
>
> [clip]
> relatedly, one thing you must learn! entire books have been written about
> others books that people have never really read. well, that's hyperbole,
> but verbal arguments criticizing social theorists are freqently made when
> others haven't read the texts/author in question.
Gasp! Horrors! Oh My Goodness!
>From Thomas Nagel, "Information Cocoons: Review of Cass Sunstein,
_Republic.Com_, LRB 5 July 2001, p. 24 (and anyone who hasn't read every
issue of LRB for the last two years plus every issue of Milton Quarterly
for the last 10 years can't play in my backyard):
****
More serious than Sunstein's fear of fragmentation is the problmem of how the common knowledge and salient range of opiions that can occupy an inevitably limited public space are to be selected. The more information that is available -- the more cultural contributions and discoveries of every kind that are produced -- the more competition there is for the limited room at the top where most people focus that portion of their attention which they reserve for the public domain. With the material multiplying ever faster, and everything also being preserved from the past and made instantly available (the history of film, for example), the problem of selection becomes overwhelming. What will our grandchildren have to learn to become part of a single civilised community? What institutions can we ourselves rely on to choose what will fall under our eyes without our searching it out?
Four hundred years ago, access was extremely difficult, but selection was not. An educated person could read everything that he could get his hands on. Today the flood of publications, films and television alone is paralysing . . . .The power of intermediaries that command the allegiance of a significant public is enormous. . . .We want to be informed of what most people are informed of, but that requires convergence on some source that acts as a co-ordinator, which, in turn, inevitably carries the risk, indeed the certainty, of arbitrariness. ******
Four hundred years is apt. It was in fact exactly 327 years ago that the first work to focus on this problem, John Milton's _Paradise Regained_, was published. The next significant documents are by Pope, the _Essay on Criticism_ and the _Dunciad_. One of the fake prefaces to the latter explains it as being evoked by the flood of authors -- not _bad_ authors, but of authors period. I don't believe anyone can thoroughly understand the issues here without an intimate acquaintance with those three works (and probably 5 to 10 thousand pages of auxiliary reading). But while these documents will help define the question, one also needs to obtain an imaginative grasp of it, to feel it on one's pulses as it were. I would suggest as a start in that direction the reading of Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Marx, Manuscripts of 1857-1861 and Manuscripts of 1861-1863, Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Korzybski, Science and Sanity, and four or five volumes of Kenneth Burke. Only then can one begin to arrive at the point where one can insist that anyone else have read anything at all except book reviews.
Carrol