Problematizing
Global Knowledge: The Theory, Culture,
& Society Encyclopedia Project
by Mike Featherstone et al, Editors
Theory, Culture, and Society Issue 23.2-3
(2006)
Sage Publications, London
616 pp., paper
ISSN: 0263-2764.
Reviewed by Eugene Thacker
School of Literature, Communication &
Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu
There is a story by Borges in which a
protagonist searches for a missing volume
in an encyclopedia set. Actually, the
search begins with an encyclopedia entry
about a remote, mysterious land that may
or may not exist. But the search for this
missing place ends up being a search for
a missing book. To make things more complicated,
it appears that one particular encyclopedia
set does indeed contain the missing volume,
while all the others do not. Rapidly,
the search for the textual verification
of a physical place recedes behind a search
for a mode of verification itself. In
a classic Borgesian move, geography and
textuality, two of our primary modes of
verification ("I was there";
"its been documented"),
thus end up undermining the search for
knowledge itself.
The encyclopedia Problematizing Global
Knowledge does not as far as
I know contain any mysterious missing
entries. But its mode of assemblage does
nevertheless encourage a critical stance
towards contemporary modes of knowledge-production,
of which the immaterial labor of academic
institutions is a primary example. The
flurry of academic texts that claim to
distill specialized knowledge into "readers,"
"key terms" anthologies, and
"very short introductions" is
a perplexing phenomenon. From the naïve
point of view, such books can be helpful
as secondary material or as an entry point
into difficult primary material. However
anyone who teaches will attest to the
fact that the reality in the classroom
is that such books often metonymically
stand in for the primary texts (the extreme
version of this would be the condensation
of, say, all of media studies into algorithms,
Haiku, or a version of Rimbauds
zutique poems).
On the surface, the Problematizing
Global Knowledge volume is exceedingly
readable and comprehensive. It is broken
up into sections that are thematically
arranged "Network," "Life/Vitalism,"
"Classification," and so on.
While its focus is on knowledge production
in a globalized context, its scope is
broader than the vaguely-named field of
media studies. This is "media studies"
as an expanded field. Each of the entries
are written by authors known and respected
in their areas of specialty. Furthermore,
the entries in a given section do not
simply sing a chorus of consensus; there
are differences between entries that are
more indicative of the richness and heterogeneity
of media studies than many of the more
reductive textbooks currently available.
Originally published as a special issue
of the journal Theory, Culture, &
Society, the volume will be re-published
as a book later this year, with additional
responses by invited authors. It also
forms the first of a series of like-minded
encyclopedias to be published by the Theory,
Culture, & Society (TCS) collective.
The challenge, then, is how to approach
the task of producing knowledge in such
forms as the encyclopedia without totality
or closure. Among other things, Borges
story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
attempts to think the encyclopedia without
closure. Paging through Problematizing
Global Knowledge, edited by the TCS
collective, we can see another, though
similar approach. Whereas Borges uses
fabulation to open the encyclopedia, the
TCS collective has used appropriation.
What form does their encyclopedia appropriate?
Well, the form of the encyclopedia, of
course. The opening sections aptly deal
with the concept of knowledge and the
form of the encyclopedia itself. Each
entry in this section patiently unravels
the very form in which it is instantiated
through its coverage of the main issues
and themes centering around each entry.
Such problems concerning epistemology
are not only raised by Diderot and dAlembert,
but they are also fundamental ontological
problems of sets and inclusion that reach
back to Plato. Thus, while there is no
Borgesian missing volume, the TCS encyclopedia
offers breadth and coverage but in a reflexive
way that always refers back to the form
of the encyclopedia itself. (This is the
"n-1" of encyclopedias. Or better,
an Encyclonomicon.)
For over 20 years now, the TCS collective
has been interrogating the transformations
and transmutations of global culture.
Situated at the cross-section between
the humanities and social sciences, the
TCS Centre publishes the well-known journals
Theory, Culture, & Society
and Body & Society, as well
as an impressive list of anthologies and
monographs published by Sage. This volume
the first in their encyclopedia
project is welcome intervention
into the disparate fields known as media
studies, science studies, and global cultural
studies. In fact hopefully
it may well end up re-defining them.