Tongue Stew: Everything is Miscellaneous, part 2

The first part of comments on Everything is Miscellaneous is here.

Here beginneth Part the Seconde:

I was going to write about how David Weinberger manages to talk about large changes without making us anxious about the new order slouching toward MySpace. I had a lengthy chunk of it written, mostly dealing with my doubts that he does justice to the ramifications of the change he's forecasting. (The tree of knowledge is central to the imagery of the text. As that tree falls, do such ramifications cease to ramify? Or do they continue, but, hidden in miscellaneity, become harder to trace?)

Anyway, here's part what I had in mind to say:

David Weinberger is talking about large changes -- like the murder of the Logos. For purposes of the narrative, the corpus of Hamlet becomes a prime example of the inessentiality, the blurring of things we like to think are monolithic sources; kingly authoritative things. Some might sense the interstitial rustling of a kingly ghost, the crumble of royal relations, a regicidal rottenness that is about to stink up the understairs.

But EiM mostly steers clear of the privates, the nether parts. The scenes are set in bright kitchens, underground archives, museum offices, Staples stores (Bias Outing: I avoid Staples like the plague -- that anal order, those white, white walls and the bins upon bins of exact replicas of pens and pencils and blotters and paper clips makes me yearn for Mexican markets, or a gatling gun); the narrative's set lighting is usually pretty bright (except in Eleanor Rosch's office) and order reigns, wildness has been tamed.

The settings, the interviews, the characters and examples all bespeak the bustle of salutary change:

Whether we’re doing it on purpose or simply by leaving tracks behind us, the public construction of meaning is the most important project of the next hundred years. 222

It's at moments like this that I want to set my phaser on Biblical and say:

David, as you know, the Goliath whose fall you are announcing is nothing less than what Western Philosophy since before Aristotle has called the Logos. You're telling us the story of Babel, only wonderfully changed for Web-based audiences. According to the patriarchal preferences of the Old Testament, the loss of the original tongue was considered a sad falling off from humankind's power to build not just towers, but the social orders of the cities that would populate them –- a collapse that left men's kind profoundly weakened, dulled, unerected, stupefied. Now you're telling us that the new enriched matrix of idiolectal variations which is supplanting the old order will enable us to regain "social knowing" via multifaceted categories, and ever more complex webs of relations. You seem to be saying that the crumbling Logos cookie will return us to a far richer stew of meanings without apparent loss of the benefits of the very thing that is said to be getting usurped.

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I still want to say all that. But the more I think about EiM, and the better the feel I get for the rigor of the thinking in the book, the more I'm inclined to want to explore how it negotiates that tricky move which is its promise. A nos moutons.

More later then.