I’ve decided to add a category to my blog in which I document the work of reading, study and writing that informs my practice as a generalist and synthesizer. I’m not entirely happy with having to prove that this approach also requires hard work, since I think that concedes more than I’d like to a productivist, bean-counting sensibility. (There’s another attitude that I find perverse: scholars on the left who could otherwise rattle off chapter and verse dismissals of how the logic of capital perverts and twists our human possibilities are sometimes remarkably quick to crack the whip on their colleagues in order to enhance their own authority.) But ok, the point is partly to demonstrate that generalism doesn’t just arise spontaneously from personal intuition, that it is a practice of investigation and inquiry. My generalism is very much mine, much as two specialists in a relatively narrow field of study can nevertheless be extremely different in their understanding of the field. I’m sure over the course of a year of documenting my readings and work, the pattern of my interests will become fairly clear.

I’m going to do this mostly as short book notes or commentary, which is a category of writing on this blog that I enjoy doing anyway and haven’t done enough of over the past year.

So let’s start inside my own “discipline of record” with the 2009 Bancroft Prize-winning book The Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hämäläinen.

Why have I been reading this book, other than it is a terrific work of historical research and analysis? Partly because I think it offers a comprehensively new framework for thinking about the relationship between non-Western and Western empires in the 19th and early 20th Century that goes well beyond the case study in its implications. Much like Richard White’s The Middle Ground and Mechal Sobel’s The World They Made Together, Hämäläinen’s study is a careful questioning of some prevalent understandings of imperial and racial domination and of the nature of imperial frontiers.

The book argues that the newly formed Comanche empire of the late 18th-early 19th Century in south-central and southwest North America did not just happen to coalesce as the early United States pushed westward and the movement towards Mexican independence began, that these were connected events which were in turn part of changes in larger patterns of global trade and political formation. Rather than insisting that Comanche imperialism was somehow dependent upon or caused by the intrusion of the West, Hämäläinen argues that it was both profoundly related to but not a consequence of Spanish, U.S. and Mexican territorial and cultural power. His account refuses to interpret “Indian dispossession back in time to structure the narrative of early America”, insisting instead that the formation of the Comancheria has to be understood on its own terms, not as a prelude to some inevitable later imperialism.

Most immediately, the book inspires me to think differently about African polities between 1780 and 1880. Hämäläinen’s analysis underscores for me the extent to which much of the political history of African societies in this period has been either similarly subjugated to a backshadowed sense of some later inevitable imperialism or is frankly shoved aside for the ways in which it complicates post=1960 nation-making projects. The history of the Ndebele polity in what is now southern Zimbabwe (and other mfecane-linked episodes of state formation) is very much an “African imperialism” with some resemblances to the Comancheria as Hamalainen describes it. It’s inconvenient to dwell on it as such as this destabilizes both the production of southern African indigeneity and the assumption of the unique moral infamy of late 19th Century white imperialism.

In a larger sense, this kind of analysis also points the way out of some of the stalls and cul-de-sacs of postcolonial theory towards the work that Anthony Appiah has been pursuing in Cosmopolitanism and The Ethics of Identity, the critique of statism that James Scott has been refining in his last few books, or the wide-frame reconceptualizing of what we mean by “empire” that Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank have initiated recently. Hämäläinen’s book is the kind of really focused, detailed reconsideration that moves conceptual and intellectual debates ahead where more abstract or theoretical interventions (such as Nicolas Thomas’ Colonialism’s Culture or David Scott’s work) might not. For exactly that reason, it’s the kind of book that should quickly leapfrog out of the specialized historiography to which it most immediately belongs and be read widely, and not just by other historians or specialists with an interest in Native American or Western culture.

LibraryThing is a great site for teaching people about folksonomies and metadata, and the interestingly debatable choices and problems they present for organizing information in a digital age. But it’s also one of my favorite examples of social networking in several respects, and looking at it again has been opening up some wider thoughts about blogging and social networks.

I spoke earlier this semester to a really interesting group of students at Bryn Mawr about how I see blogging as a form and practice as I think about it reflectively. One of the things I talked about with them is an issue I’ve occasionally reflected upon within the blog, which is how the voice that I’ve crafted here is both a treasured accomplishment and a frustrating confinement. I might have an inaccurate understanding of myself and the impression I leave in person, but I often feel like I’m looser, jazzier, more amusing, less pompous, in my daily work as a teacher and colleague than I am as a blogger. But when I try to write in that voice, it comes out snarky, barbed, and maybe altogether too typical in the hurly-burly Punch-and-Judy show of online discourse. So the Man of Reason is what I’ve made myself out to be, and so I’ll largely have to remain.

How does this connect to LibraryThing? Well, partly because LibraryThing is one of the sites that solves for me the problem of connecting me to those connections that I’d both ideally like to have and finding for me those connections which I never knew that I wanted but that seem indispensible once I discover them. It also gives a clearer, truer picture of who I am in many ways than this blog or my Facebook page or various other public selves I have on display. That’s always been the driver for me in online writing and reading: the hope of serendipity, of strange attractors, finding people and ideas and conversations that I can’t find in my immediate environment, but also of self-definition.

Partly also because LibraryThing is a likeable design. One of the things I said to the Bryn Mawr class was that I don’t do more in the online environment that their class is being taught within (Serendip) because I find it frustrating to use. I have enough trouble with organization when I have complete control over my environment, so finding my way through a non-standard UI maze not of my own making is often a non-starter for me. So the way that words and interfaces connect on the screen is part of what makes online sociality work for me, the same way that the architecture and acoustics of a room can have a profound impact on how well a group works together or converses in that room.

What LibraryThing does is balance the strange attractors with a sense of discovering dopplegangers. It produces the warming, pleasant feelings of confirmation that the online world sometimes allows, a revelation that out there somewhere, there are people who are strikingly like yourself in some respect, who have navigated the dizzying variety and complexity of contemporary culture with an eye to the same guiding stars.

In every online venue I’ve been involved with, I hit a point where those discoveries start to grind to a halt. The warm and fuzzy security of discovering that you are not entirely freakish in some of your affectations and habits fades, and you often start to discover that the person who looked like your twin is really not nearly so alike as their online persona might suggest.

At some point, in a given space, there is no more novelty, no more unexpected voices. Or the unexpected voices that remain are simply too alien or difficult or repellant: I find my boundaries and no matter how notionally open I might be to their rearrangement, to a continuing traffic across that frontier, I have no desire to remain infinitely open. That feels too much like surrender, like a complete loss of individual distinctiveness.

I think this is one place where I sometimes part company with my friends at Bryn Mawr who are interested not just in studying emergent processes but in deliberately incorporating emergent principles into their own institutional and personal lives. Some of what I have learned and continue to learn by exposure to online community and discussion feels emergent in that sense, but I’m not willing to cast off the line of my boat and just drift anywhere the sea chooses to take me. One of the things I told the students was that the individual authorship of my voice (even the stilted, sometimes pretentious, always verbose voice of this blog) is also a big priority for me. I don’t see that there’s anything attractive about embracing dialogue so completely that your next thought is always directly produced by the last thought of a dialogic partner, a smothering tit-for-tat. Some good thoughts come from solitude, from the unexpected recesses of the self, from not answering to the last reply or bouncing off of the last link.

I kept meaning to put my list of the six best fantasy novels into the comments thread at Crooked Timber but time got the better of me and before I knew it what was up at CT instead was a bizarrely contentious comments thread on Scott McLemee’s totally legitimate critique of Cornel West’s latest book.

So much later, here’s my list of the best six TEN fantasy novels it is!

But first a word on this sort of exercise as well. Some might poo-poo the idea of such a list as always hobbled by the mixing of apples and oranges, or by the impossibility of clearly defining the field from which a list is selected. The thread at Crooked Timber had a lot of that kind of discussion. But it also showed why the exercise is a good one, partly because it brings out into the open the range of assumptions that audiences make about a particular kind of culture. It’s also interesting to see how passionately felt these kinds of judgments can be, both about individual works that one puts (or does not put) on a list, and about what the principles of constructing such a list ought to be. For myself, when I make a list like this, I try to balance representing the diversity of a field with a nod to canonical works which I agree have great historical importance in shaping that field. Plus I like to throw in a few idiosyncratic judgments about work that I think is underrepresented or overlooked.

So here’s my list:

John Crowley, Little, Big. In the CT thread, there was a pretty sharp split between people that simply don’t like this book and those that love it. I can actually see both sides. It’s a very atmospheric work: you’re either drawn into the mood it creates or you’re not.

Barry Hughart, Bridge of Birds. There isn’t a lot of fantasy out there that works with non-Western themes, stock narratives, and so on. Some of the few books that try to do so come off pretty badly because they’re built on a crudely Western perspective on non-Western folk cultures or mythologies. But I really like Hughart’s work with a fantasy China in his hard-to-find series.

Ursula Le Guin, The Farthest Shore. Earthsea seems another series that divides a lot of genre readers. For me, it was an important counterpoint to Tolkien when I first discovered it: quieter, more contemplative, intelligent in its thinking about magic. It’s such a commonplace in fantasy works that magic has a price or a cost, but rarely is that worked out as more than a slogan, given that readers are almost always meant to covet magic and identify with sensitive wielders of its power within a given setting.

Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan. Another book to savor for mood rather than plot, but I think that’s often what defines fantasy best, as a setting and feeling. Plot-driven fantasy frequently struggles to be anything besides “innocent farm boy discovers he is secretly a prince, gets a magic sword and a wise mentor, meets girl, loses girl, defeats enemy, wins kingdom, gets girl.” I first read Titus Groan while living in a homely but pleasant bedsit in London while doing my dissertation research: it pretty much defined for me that sense of a fantasy work that generated a sense of being adrift in a world whose everyday rules and sensations were different from my own.

K.J. Bishop, The Etched City. Yet another book that’s about mood rather than story. (In fact, the plot misses a lot of opportunities for smart closure and clever connections.) I regard this book as my favorite example of the kind of fantasy that Mieville, Vandermeer, or Alan Campbell have written, of grim quasi-Victorian imaginary cities full of dark satanic mills of one sort or another.

Lloyd Alexander, The High King. Despite my slang above on the boy-becomes-king narrative, this is a really terrific example of that baseline story. What makes it work so well even now is partly the persuasive underlying morality of the story, that its protagonist is faced with such difficult choices and genuinely earns his kingship rather than by some innate nobility.

Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light. Right, I know, it’s also “science fiction”. A good book for pushing genre definitions in that respect, but it’s also just a great book, period. When I first read it as a teenager, I do remember getting a bit tripped up on the temporal framing of the story until I’d read it through twice, and even now that seems a bit rough to me. It has some of Zelazny’s typical schtick, but it’s in its most appealing and interesting form here.

T.H. White, The Once and Future King. Long a favorite, but I do sometimes wonder why when I re-read it. It has long stretches that are emotionally distant. The Lancelot-Guinevere material suffers some from White’s own remote and austerely tormented masculinity, his inability to really imagine Guinevere (or any other woman) in an even vaguely sympathetic way. When I was young, the material after Arthur’s childhood didn’t always work for me. But now at least some of it does: the regrets, the inability to break habits, the confinement of commitments made and codes adopted. The moral force of the first book is also still so very powerful, and the little asides about medieval life are also a kind of ground-floor realism about that backdrop that the routine sword-and-sorcery works in the genre still decline to take up.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon. Best read alongside White, but it’s also a smart critique of the entire genre, and opened the way for a lot of other inversions and deconstructions.

JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. Gotta have it, even if its many imitations are an affliction on fantasy as a whole.
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What’s not on my top ten, and why.

George R.R. Martin. Partly because the series is unfinished (I suspect it will remain so) and partly because I think the pleasures of A Song of Fire and Ice are partly a matter of counterprogramming against a wretched brood of tolkienish imitators.

John Bellairs, The Face in the Frost. A bit too slight to make the top ten, but I do love this book.

Phillip Pullman, His Dark Materials. I like The Amber Spyglass better than most people do, but I’d agree the series falls down a bit in a number of ways in the third volume.

Samuel Delany, Neveryon. I tried to teach this book once in a course on historical memory. Unfortunately takes about 600 pages (and two books in the series) for the point to sink home, so it didn’t work very well. I think I’d include it as part of any master course in fantasy–it’s a great work of literary criticism disguised as a work of literature, really.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter. I really do like these books as a whole, but I don’t think of them as top ten material.

Guy Gavriel Kay. Again, almost. I just don’t think anything Kay has written quite cracks this list–yet. But I feel as if some future work might. Kay raises the same question for me that Susanna Clark (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell) does: namely, what does making a work of fiction into a work of fantasy permit that writing a historical novel does not? I’m not always clear with Kay or Clark what writing in a speculative mode accomplishes.

Clive Barker, Imajica. The CT thread brought this up, and I was almost tempted to include it, as I remember it making a big impression on me when I read it. But there’s something about the book that doesn’t quite cross the threshold, though I’m hard-pressed to say why.

Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood. Too diagrammatic, which is sort of the point of the book, I know. Again, I’d include it in any master-class on fantasy, for sure.

Neil Gaiman. You may commence throwing things at me, but I think he’s a pleasant but unextraordinary fantasy writer who is also the writer of a very good comic-book series. None of his fantasy novels have wowed me, though none of them have bugged or annoyed me, either.

Madeline L’Engle, Wrinkle in Time and Wind in the Door. Still very good books, but re-reading them, I found them a bit preachy and very prone to declare rather than show when it comes to declaring things beautiful and wonderful and horrible.

Jorge Luis Borges. If I were to classify him as fantasy? Oh yes, we have a winner. I guess when all is said and done, I still think of fantasy as genre, which is not the same as fiction with elements of the fantastic. That list is a different list populated with Swift, Shelley, Borges and others. But I know full well that this is also a bad view in many respects, using genre as confinement, as a kind of fannish self-hatred, and so on. It sets up a wretched situation where the fan has to argue that their favorite works are “really” literature, or deserve favorable comparison with “mainstream” work. But genre is real, or at least the real product of histories of readership and circulation, and can’t just be abolished like that. I do think it would be profitable to ask which of the ten above I’d put into the same weight class as Swift or Borges and think they’d emerge creditably. On the flip side, ask me when the last time I read Swift for pleasure, and he might not come out so well. (Borges does pretty well in either context, on the other hand.)

Pathfinders is like other works of global history by Fernandez-Armesto: a readable, pleasant synthesis that doesn’t add much to a historian’s analytic toolkit, but it puts narratives and information that have often been told in a markedly Eurocentric way into a broader comparative perspective.

I’m going to focus on one specific thing I noticed in this book that I think speaks to a wider problem in the writing of global histories of this kind. Fernandez-Armesto works very hard to draw in examples and cases from most regions of the world, particularly when he’s talking about premodern exploration. When he gets to 1500, he serves up a modest amount of Iberiocentrism, but he’s honest about that, and rather charming. Plus it’s hard to argue against the centrality of Spain and Portugal in maritime exploration from 1500 to 1650.

However, this drive to globalize history often draws world historians into a complicated tension with area studies specialists. I’ve been very clear about my dissatisfaction with the tendency towards intellectual parochalism among Africanists, but some of that tendency is rooted in some genuinely important priorities.

Here’s an example drawn from Pathfinders. Early in the book, Fernandez-Armesto is talking about early cartographic or navigational practices in human societies, and reasonably concludes that there must have been some practices employed in some early premodern societies beyond dumb luck. Absolutely: it’s completely fair to infer that premodern human societies may have had all variety of interesting mnemonic and representational techniques for remembering or communicating how to go from here to there, and some of these may be of profound antiquity.

In this discussion, he uses a few African examples that unfortunately illustrate the intellectual predicament of Africanist historians.The way he uses Africa is as many world or comparative historians do: by citing recently observed practices that suggest what was likely done in antiquity by all humans. This is the conventional logic of using 19th or early 20th Century Africa as if it were a window into prehistory, unchanged tradition. The examples Fernandez-Armesto uses specifically in this case are Marcel Griaule’s work on Dogon cosmology with its map-like constructions, MacGaffey’s work on Kongo cosmographs, and scholarship on 20th Century Luba chiefship ceremonies which include geographical knowledge of sacred and ritual sites.

The problem is that all of these examples, Africanist scholars know, are anything but unchanged windows into the distant human past: they’re practices and ideas that have almost certainly changed considerably over time AND they were described by and in some cases actively reinvented by Western officials and scholars with very bounded ideas and preconceptions about African history and society. There’s a considerable mini-literature on Griaule and his intellectual history that makes it impossible to take anything he wrote or said about Dogon cosmology at face value. MacGaffey has noted that cosmographs as he describes them strike him as both recent and highly dynamic, changeable inventions.

These examples tell you about the distant human past about as much as saying, “Contemporary Americans often give directions to important locations by citing commercial landmarks rather than formal maps, e.g., ‘Take a left at the Kentucky Fried Chicken, if you pass the Wal-Mart you’ve gone too far'”. That actually does tell you in a universal, general sense about how people might have navigated in early societies, but it doesn’t tell you any specifics. Fernandez-Armesto regards recent African examples as directly suggestive of practice in antiquity (e.g., not just general illustrations, but “Maybe here’s how the Dogon did it back then” or “The Luba probably valued this kind of geographical knowledge back in prehistory and remembered it through chiefly investiture and oral tradition.”) Africanists know that there weren’t any Luba as such in the early premodern period that Fernandez-Armesto is working with early in his book, any more than there were suburban Long Islanders with lawns and backyard swing sets in Neolithic times.

But when the Africanist gets all snippy about this problem, insisting in almost cliched terms that African societies were also dynamic and historical and changing, the world historian or comparativist says eagerly, “Great, so tell me about what West African societies were like around 200 AD or so, especially any details on their cartographic or geographical practices, so I can give some examples that compare to Rome, China, Arabia, and so on”. And here the Africanist mostly has to say, “Sorry, don’t know. Pretty much can’t know, not at that level of specificity.” Or even more sheepishly, “Well, I can tell you what a handful of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and South Asian sources say about those places, but a lot of that is little more than thrice-told stories from merchants.” Plus the Africanist can make use of some archaeology and linguistics, but as Fernandez-Armesto points out, there are a great many imaginable geographic or cartographic practices in prehistory or antiquity which may have left no material or artifactual record behind.

So now the world historian has to ask, “So, how about it, guys? Should I just leave Africa out of what I’m talking about unless I have highly specific, properly historicized examples, which means it’s going to be left out of a lot of my account, or should I use whatever I can find, and without a lot of methodological song-and-dance each time I do so, because that’s going to mess with the readability and coherence of my synthesis”.

Africanists often seem to reply, “Either one, you choose, and we’ll complain about it either way”. The problem is that the complaint in either case has some validity to it, but the global historian’s choice either way is also fairly valid. I don’t have an easy answer. On some subjects, there may well be a chronologically appropriate comparison for a global historian to use that comes from Africa or Mesoamerica or Oceania. On many others, the details and specificity in premodern world history are going to come from literate, record-keeping societies even when we can be fairly certain that there were examples of the same practices or institutions or ideas in non-literate societies elsewhere in the world.

If I were building such a class, I’d teach Louis Sachar’s novel Holes as a premiere example of brilliant plot construction. Every gun on the mantlepiece gets fired eventually somewhere in the story, and exactly when it needs to be.

I read the entire book to my daughter and my wife this past weekend. We started, got a little ways in, and then both of them wanted to hear the whole thing right away, which is a tribute to Sachar’s storytelling. You could use the book as a sort of sonar for detecting inauthenticity and excess in other fiction, especially young adult and children’s fiction. Sachar uses race, he uses history, he uses hardship, but it never seems forced or demanded by a didactic project.

I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Part of believing that knowledge is progressive, however, is also a belief that some older practices of historical writing fell by the wayside because they intrinsically weak in some respect, because they couldn’t hold up to sustained challenges from newer methodologies, couldn’t defend against critical examination. There’s a kind of 19th Century narrative history, for example, that is a lot of fun to read today for its literary qualities and lack of inhibitions about things like evidence and truth, but I don’t think scholarly historians are likely to return to writing fabulistic biographies and stirring if largely invented tales of derring-do.

There is a style of intellectual history that has fallen out of fashion, and I’m hoping it largely stays that way. Intellectual history and cultural history are often very closely related styles of scholarly writing, and in many ways, I think what is emerging out of their intertwining is a new hybrid form of historical study that has the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither, that can study how a particular idea or concept moved in and out of formal thought and expression into wider popular consciousness or practice. Sometimes, though, there’s real value in a narrower focus, in tracing the successive development of a highly particular idea in formal published writing or texts. Say, in an intellectual history of the concept of sovereignty within British political philosophy in the 19th Century.

The variation on that style that I dislike, however, is when a contemporary devotee of some idea or institution writes a triumphalist intellectual history about how the march of time has beat a path to the writer’s very own doorstep. Partly this kind of intellectual history is a scavenger hunt through the past, an attempt to annex notable and famous figures as the glorious forebearers of the contemporary practicioner. Partly it smooths out any bumps or disagreements about the practice itself so that the story is itself entirely about ascendance: anything unseemly in the past history of the idea is something which was reformed or overcome. This kind of history only pretends to be about tracing how a concept or idea changed over time. There is a kind of bad or potted history of science that some contemporary scientists will recite that very much follows this outline, in which today’s practices are the most perfectly perfect of all (until tomorrow), and the past only a record of errors overcome, a history which the present has corrected and absorbed into its own ascendant body.

Which brings me to Oona Strathern’s book A Brief History of the Future. Since I teach a course on the history of the future, I had high hopes for this book. I’m always looking for something that can help the students grasp the overall picture. Web sites like Paleofuture and Retrofuture are pretty much on the right wavelength, but they don’t have the narrative to knit together Enlightenment conceptions of progress, Christian millennialism, high modernist futurism, postwar technosocial optimism, policy-driving futurism, postmodern skepticism, and contemporary talk about the Singularity.

Strathern’s book is definitely not the droid I’m looking for. For one, it’s mistitled. It is not a history of the future as an idea. It is a history of futurism, the intellectual practice of forecasting or predicting the future. That would still be useful to me, as well as interesting, if it had any critical distance at all from futurism. But it doesn’t: the book largely is an attempt to validate Strathern’s own practice as a futurist, both by burnishing her own credentials and by describing futurism in relentlessly whiggish terms, as a practice which has grown more and more professional, credible, useful, precise and focused over time.

So yes, there’s the usual annexation going on here, in which notable individuals and authors in the past are understood not just to be concerned with the future, but to be nascent or founding futurists, the fathers and mothers of a contemporary profession. There is the requisite disavowal of bad futurism, whose errors were not a complex product of how conceptions of “the future” as a concept interacted with a particular moment in time, but were the consequence of an imperfect or unprofessionalized practice of futurism.

When I look at the history of the future as an idea, even just sticking with formal texts written by past intellectuals, policy-makers and so on, I see something vastly more discontinuous and multivalent than Strathern. Apocalyptic and utopian claims colliding and intermingling, both coming out of deep reservoirs of modern Western experience and thought. Ideas about the future becoming the animating spirit of governmental or institutional action, and then falling out of favor. The future as a powerful belief system at one moment and as the target of scorn and cynicism in another.

There’s a history that links Disney with Corbusier very directly, for example, but you’ve got to pay attention to the entirely different registers and institutional worlds that their visions operated within, as well as the alchemical difference between Brasilia and Epcot. You can bring Condorcet into a history that culminates with John Naisbett, but not if you make the former the noble ancestor of the professional latter: the relationship is far more diffuse and complicated than that.

Where I found myself especially irritated is as Strathern approaches the present, and contemporaries whom she wishes to compliment and associate herself with. The book seems largely unaware of something that is palpably obvious to me, which is that the expert-driven, policy-oriented futurism of the 1960s, closely tied to the sort of technological optimism that saw us all as driving flying cars, using jet-packs and living on the Moon by 2001, was pretty much thrown by the wayside in the 1980s and 1990s. Both because its projections and predictions were wildly, amusingly wrong, but also because of some basic shifts in the popular zeitgeist, in the entirety of how progress fit into the self-conception of Western and global society. In the kind of history that Strathern is writing, that wider context doesn’t exist. She knows that past futurism was wrong, but her understanding of that shift is simply that futurists got better at what they do, constrained their predictions more, and can now be trusted not to promise jet packs and a world free of hunger when you hire them to do projections.

The changes in way the concept of future was represented, imagined, used and described in the U.S. and Western Europe during 1980s weren’t just about a reaction, a realization that older projections were factually wrong. The same goes for other moments in this history. There isn’t an unbroken line between Enlightenment conceptions of progress and high modernist futurism: the players were different, the contexts were different, the applications of the concepts were different. The historical relationship is there, but it is complicated, diffuse, a matter of influence and subtle inheritance rather than familial descent.

I think that’s the kind of intellectual history I accept from someone who wants to explore the roots of their own practices in a self-complimentary way. It’s fine to talk about influences, to look for the ways that the past has shaped your own professional and personal worlds. Influence is not ascension, however. This kind of intellectual history recognizes that any contemporary idea has junk DNA in its genes, has unacknowledged ancestral branches full of bastards and incest, that its evolutionary line is a bush and not a spine, and that what that idea is doing right here and now is as much a matter of its nurture in the bosom of the present as its inheritance of the past.

Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous feels to me more like one of the former than the latter. The book strains to say something new about digital search and digital knowledge. It also has the obsession that some of the digerati have with proclaiming the digital as a utopian revolution against an old order. It’s not really thinking in original ways about the history of categories, typologies, information hierarchies, catalogs and so on: we get the obligatory fly-by of Plato and Aristotle, sure, but not much in-between. It’s only at the end that Weinberger even asks the question: if knowledge is intrinsically miscellaneous, why have we had such a long interregnum of typology, taxonomy, and classification? What he offers is a kind of three-page potted sort of Enlightenment-style fable about how we fell from miscellaneous Eden through the original sin of some old thinkers and now can glimpse utopia once again.

It feels as if he’s selling something. This is one thing that really wearies me about a certain kind of writing by the digerati. It’s often reads as if the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has just pulled up and invited me to hop on his caged bandwagon. On one level, Weinberger is just preaching the gospel of Web 2.0, and I’m pretty much inside that revival tent myself. When he describes four key strategies (filter on the way out not the way in, associate a piece of information with as many classification systems as possible, everything is metadata and everything can be a label, and give up control), I pretty much agree with them all as approaches. I just don’t accept them as inevitable, universal and ubiquitious.

What irritates me is the either/or character of his presentation, which is one of the basic attributes of digerati manifestos. You’re in or you’re out. This is the way to do it, all other ways are bad. Thank god technology is at last liberating information and knowledge. There are no choices to be made, only discoveries of the one true way. People who feel confused or alienated by a Web 2.0 environment are just fossils. Information is miscellaneous, in Weinberger’s description. Reality is being unveiled at last.

It reminds me a bit of naive holism, of flip dismissals of “reductionism” in knowledge systems. Saying that you’re against reductionism or for it is like saying that you’re against breathing out carbon dioxide but very much in favor of breathing in oxygen. We confine or expand the questions we’re asking of the world situationally, in dynamic relationship to other people’s questions and our own purposes of the moment. Today I may compress some heuristic boundary I’m using, tomorrow I may discard it, and I’ll be perfectly right to do so both times. The same goes for information and knowledge as “miscellaneous”. Today I may classify from the top, tomorrow I may tag from below. Today I may want to be in a narrow, tightly-bounded conversation with a limited number of specialists who are following disciplinary constraints; tomorrow I may want to drift on the ocean of humanity’s digital sea, seeing what I pull up in my net.

The problem with old expert-driven bibliographic control or academic disciplinarity is that its strong correspondence with institutional organization made it seem both natural and essential to its practicioners, rather than a strategic tool adopted at certain moments to heighten the generativity or focus of knowledge-production–and it encouraged highly specialized knowledge practices to claim the right to dominate public decision-making and everyday forms of knowing as their birthright. Old practices of cataloging and disciplinarity kept scholars and experts from remembering that those practices were provisional, tactical responses to knowledge production.

Weinberger is right that everything can be and often should be miscellaneous, as he describes it. The problem is that he goes well beyond that to proclaim this as manifest destiny: “traditional trees”, as he puts it, have been “useful”, but it’s rather the same way that we might say that horses were useful for getting around before the internal combustion engine. Knowledge, in his view, is not organized. This is a Platonic claim about the essential character of all knowledge, at all times. When it’s organized prior to use, that’s a false, misshapen imposition. No capacities, abilities, or possibilities are lost in the recognition of the truth of knowledge’s miscellaneous character.

“In the miscellanized world, every idea is discussed, so no idea remains simple for long.” (p. 213) Doesn’t that just warm your heart? I feel as if Tiny Tim is about to yell out, “God bless us, everyone”. But when there isn’t any discussion anywhere of the disadvantages, the problems, the practical challenges, the downsides of what Weinberger calls “the third order”, when there isn’t any kind of sophisticated investigation of why past systems for organizing knowledge came to exist, then I’m uneasy even if I’m interested in and open to what he’s peddling.

One thing I sometimes say in reply is, “Well, they’re the tools of my trade”. Truth to tell, there are some on the shelves that I haven’t opened in years, and maybe a few that it’s likely I’ll never open again. However, if they’re involved in my teaching in any manner, I tend to look at them a lot.

I’m guessing that many academics have a class of books that they frequently consult while preparing lectures or thinking about class discussions: books that concern areas of specialized knowledge that are not quite directly your own field but are quite close to it, that read very plainly and clearly, and that make minimal arguments or are theoretically unadorned while being informationally dense. Textbooks for specialists might be the best way to think of these works.

The Birmingham and Martin anthology is a great example of this kind of book. When I’m teaching precolonial Central Africa, I often pull it off the shelf to refresh my knowledge and prepare my lectures. I’m not familiar enough with various precolonial states or peoples in the region to rattle off details about them intuitively: keeping Fang, Azande, Mangbetu and so on clear from one another is important but I really have to get a refresher every couple of years. (Whereas most southern African states and ethnonyms I know without review because I make use of that history in my own writing as well as in teaching.)

Once upon a time, I’m sure that the editors and publishers of this volume and its companion modern volume hoped it might be adopted for undergraduate use. Maybe it was when it was in print. I haven’t used it myself as an undergraduate reading, because I think you need to know quite a lot before reading it to make good use of what it has to say. It has the problem that a lot of Africanist writing has when it comes to communicating with non-specialist American or European audiences: little or no prior experience with the subject matter makes retaining names, details, and places very difficult.

It is the kind of writing that I think specialists should be writing for other specialists, though: a concise review of specialized knowledge about some basic or fundamental subject area. Effectively, a high-level Wikipedia, written just for us. No intent to resolve major disputes or stake an original claim (though all the authors in the Birmingham and Martin volume were picked because at the time, they were known as scholars who had made original research findings about the history of particular regions or states within Central, East and Southern Africa).

There is one thing that I wanted to discuss in this shorter, non-review context, however. I’m really taking Galloway’s work as an example of a wider pattern in humanistic scholarship, so it should be understood that what I’m going to say is not just applicable to him.

Rather than complain about jargon per se, what bothers me a little is the largely aesthetic need in critical theory to produce terminological and conceptual novelty in order to authenticate the labor of producing theory. It’s a formal characteristic of some theory-work that runs very deep. James Miller’s Lingua Franca essay “Is Bad Writing Necessary?: George Orwell, Theodor Adorno and the Politics of Literature” is still one of the best, concise treatments of some of these questions. (For all that Lingua Franca sometimes featured weakly reported pieces, I really miss it.)

You would think it would be enough to write some short, clever essays on gaming and digital culture that integrated theoretical insights where appropriate. The problem in terms of building academic reputation capital is that it’s not clear where the specialization or expertise enters into that, or what would distinguish essays by a scholarly critic of digital culture from, say, Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy. My answer would be, in the sense of Miller’s article, Orwellian: what would distinguish the work of the academic is that it is intellectual, not that it is expert. In other words, it’s sufficient to be smart and to write well, that is to say, clearly.

Galloway’s book is smart, has novel insights, and is often (to me, at least), written clearly. The frustration I have is first that Galloway regards theory as something which requires the creation of a technical vocabulary and second that he seems to think that in order to make a contribution which establishes his academic credentials as a theorist in this area, he must fashion that vocabulary himself. (Wark and Bogost do some of this as well, as do critical theorists writing about most forms or genres.)

So, for example, his argument that video games are actions? Completely legitimate, important, useful. His argument that they are algorithimic cultural objects, and thus, that video games in certain ways have more in common with spreadsheets than checkers? Also important. His use of diegetic and nondiegetic, borrowed from film theory? Ok by me, though here I think the vocabulary is beginning to be more about establishing credibility with a chosen set of academic peers than delivering analysis which can only come through this particular terminology.

Galloway’s insistence that this all adds up to a distinctive body of gamic theory? This is where I feel as if something’s going on that doesn’t need to go on, and it’s going on in a fashion that’s has a sort of excess performativity that grates on me. Start with that word: “gamic”. It’s not just that it has the inelegance that theoretical neologisms often have, that harsh-sounding quality that is meant to emulate the unnatural technical sound of much scientific vocabulary. It’s that there’s already a term which Galloway studiously ignores. Not argues against, except in a single footnote: interactive. Yes, sure, I know that a theorist could find a million ways to talk about why that term is misleading, inaccurate, and so on. This is what Galloway does in one footnote. (Not for the first time, I’m struck that critical theory sometimes has a back-door empiricism in the way it coins and dismisses terms and words, as if the goal of a particular term is to provide a fully mimetic match to a particular specific textual or expressive phenomenon.) But it’s there, it has a reasonably good common-language sound to it, and it’s already in use.

What Galloway does isn’t just prefer his own word, gamic. (Which, I was surprised to find, has another existing meaning: a product or consequence of sex.) He declares theory as if he is inaugurating or inventing it. “Begin like this”, he writes, “If photographs are images, and films are moving images, then video games are actions. Let this be word one for video game theory.” (p. 2) You read that and wonder if he remembered to pick up a few extra tablets of God’s Commandments while he was up on the mountaintop. Sure, eventually some of the standard names will be dropped, both on games (Callois and Huizinga) and on theory (Deleuze, Geertz, Derrida). But the essays work hard, especially the first, to perform the role of theory-creator, and to convey sufficient austerity and distance in the relation between the medium and the critic. There’s even the de rigeur exaltation of “countergaming” at the end: no work of high theory about an existing form is complete if it doesn’t wish for that existing form to be displaced by avant-garde alternatives which disrupt the complicit character of a culture-industry mass-medium and therefore aim to produce true art. (Though he makes a great point that most “serious games” or art-games attempt to dissent from the games industry “through a lapse back to other media entirely” [p. 126].)

Again, don’t get me wrong. The essay on the cinematic origins of the first-person shooter is terrific, and the treatment of “allegories of control” in sandbox games is also incredibly useful and insightful. Everything in the book is good and important, and Galloway is very much a peer to Wark, Bogost and others writing on the theory of digital games. But it just seems to me that there is a way to write theory with rhetorical humility, to get down into the trenches with audiences, and to not make neologism and conceptual invention the defining attribute of theoretical contribution.

[I made a slight change to this entry a short while after posting it to note that Galloway does have one footnote dealing with the term interactivity, in which he pretty much performs that back-door empiricism: e.g., that the problem with interactivity is that it’s not accurate to the reality of games.]