ABSTRACT
For a brilliant analysis of the “restorative disabling,” or what he terms “indigence,” inherent to encyclopedic narrative/discourse, see Jed Rasula, “Textual Indigence in the Archive,” Postmodern Culture 9, no. 3 (1999), <muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v009/9.3rasula.html>. Through trenchant readings of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Thomas Mann, Herman Melville, and James Joyce, Rasula conjectures that the (narrative) impulse to thematize the All (formerly the universal) brings with it a “thicken[ing]” agent (paragraph 37) that complicates reductive notions of knowledge, of our capacity to know (there may be a trace here of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz, after Gilbert Ryle, called “thick description”). Despite the rosier epistemological proclamations associated with our digital era, “the issue is not strictly technological,” for more “organic visions” are equally culpable on the count of presuming “faith in the beneficence of a higher power” (paragraph 38; Rasula cites, among others, James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, C. G. Jung’s collective unconscious, and “utopian affirmations of our multi-media ‘infosphere’” as a sort of “global nervous system”). It is precisely against such cosmic convictions that indigence, as theorized analogically by Rasula, may augur an “apparently aimless circularity” that serves to offset “the new dromocracy [sic]—the world of entitlements to speed,” thus instructing us as to “the scope and limits of ‘learning’ as such” (paragraph 39). As for “thick description,” see Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
