Notes On Files
C. Wright Mills once wrote in a rather spry appendix that everything he produced ultimately boiled down to the rearranging of his file. Certainly, in the American post-war period Mills' was writing in and about, a file meant something different than it does now. Paper and a pen or pencil, at the very least. And somewhere to store the scribbled-upon pieces of paper.
If one was fastidious, perhaps they had many manilla folders and even a set of file-cabinets. If they were less outwardly scrupulous, perhaps the file might have appeared as stacks of papers, strewn across a room. But a file did mean some kind of method to the madness — a partial but practical coherence within a noisy world. A file was a microcosm to which one could return, again and again, to organize one's thoughts about the outer world by building an inner world one's own.
A file today might look more like a repository of many different files. Text files, images, gifs — or maybe a dataset and some python code, for the number cruncher. And it may be built out of many different worlds: the world of email, of shared documents, of saved articles on this or that platform. A repository might exist in what we now rather misleadingly call "the cloud" — which really means its contents are housed elsewhere, on someone else's server racks.
Mills' file served as an ongoing collection of materials for all present and future projects and sub-projects. It contained an array of materials: random thoughts, excerpts from books, outlines, bibliographic materials. But most importantly it contained notes — the building blocks of those projects and sub-projects, which, by keeping an active file, one could begin to conceive. Perhaps the test of a good file was whether the world of one's own corresponded to the world one tried to make known.
Out of maintaining and rearranging an organized file came Mills' papers and books: "organized releases from the continuous work that goes into them." In keeping a modern repository, though, it might make more sense to have a few different channels for the release of one's work. Hence, in addition to publishing papers, essays, or books, one might also occasionally post a blog, or issue a tweet. Perhaps the test of a good blog or tweet is whether its contents cut through most of what exists in the wide world of the web — the information fog.
So think of this as the first in a series of semi-organized, partially-coherent releases of the continuous work that goes into keeping a modern repository. It will include thoughts about issues of the modern world, as well as some less-than-fully-formed reviews of scholarly books read over the course of the next few years. It will include links to things I publish elsewhere, if I can manage to do that. And, of course, it will contain notes.
It's a blog, but, at the same time, a review: a look at the present with a view back to history and out towards the structures of society. It is the short-form result of the attempt to organize the output of working with the materials of the contemporary production of knowledge.