At first I was obsessed with the leaked cables, but I’ve been distracted from the cables themselves by my fascination with people’s responses to WikiLeaks (in spite of my resistance, I guess there may be a sociologist inside after all). I watch to see what people ‘say’ on Facebook. I prod my students to understand and formulate responses. I read. When I read, I follow links until I’m lost and have forgotten where it all began. I’m not sure how I ended up here (I suppose I could check my history and see the traces of my route), but the title seemed promising, interesting: “Everything Is Data, but Data Isn’t Everything.” More promising was the start of the article: “The media theorist Lev Manovich has said that the definitive informational metaphor of our epoch is the database. The database is not just a metaphor, in fact—it’s a certification of what knowledge looks like and how it is to be gained. A metaphor is a carrier, a condensation of meaning. A database is a heap.” Then the discussion goes south. It continues with the now familiar comparison of WikiLeaks to the Pentagon Papers and critiques “the heap.” The “data dump” is indiscriminate and non-narrative. Moreover, Assange questions the legitimacy of the state. But, isn’t this simply reflective of the world we inhabit? Is this a sound basis for critique? We live in a world where we are increasingly accustomed to the heap, the dump of information. We’ve developed skills and dispositions to respond to this. We question the legitimacy of the state. The narrative has broken down.
A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. his eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of this feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin, thesis IX from “Theses on the Philosophy of History”)
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