https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo45558255.html

Robyn Taylor-Neu: So, my first question is pretty standard: how would you explain the overarching argument of the book?

John Durham Peters: The overall argument of the book is probably inseparable from the process of how it came to be, but I’ll bracket that for now. The argument is that knowledge has always been leaky, has always exceeded its bounds, and that the history of knowledge—at least since the 17th century, which is the range that we’re looking at, with the closest focus on the 19th and 20th century—is a history of containers of various kinds such as peer review, images, encyclopedias, universities, institutional fields, Title IX rules. There are so many different ways of corralling this thing called knowledge. The obvious impetus for writing a book about promiscuous knowledge was the internet. I think it started when Ken Cmiel, my co-author, discovered that his mom had been looking online trying to diagnose her own heart condition. This was fairly early on in internet history, but he was kind of freaked out. What did it mean that she was getting mixed advice from certified experts and freelancers online? This concern has obviously ballooned in the age of authoritarian populism and internet “truthiness,” as Stephen Colbert would call it. 

I don’t think we’re shrugging and saying, oh, knowledge has always been leaky, let a thousand flowers bloom. Rather, I think we’re trying to say: knowledge really matters, but you have to figure out its containers in each particular time or context.  In fact, you want containers to leak or at least open up.  This is a point made in a brilliant essay on container technologies by the Australian feminist Zoe Sofia from 25 years ago. We’re not throwing up our hands in a kind of postmodernist glee about promiscuous knowledge. It’s more ambivalent—an appreciation for new openings and a worry about expertise, gatekeeping, discerning true and false. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: I am curious about the form of the book—about what the form of the book does. You mention that Kenneth Cmiel’s vision was that “nothing but the cat’s grin” would remain, a kind of extreme reduction of facts. But you also mention that the book’s final form was much more than “just the grin.” So, the question: how to strike that balance between a proliferation of facts, many of them unruly or cacophonous, and the through-line (for me, the book has a very clear through-line). In other words: how does the book enact the kind of promiscuous knowledge that is also its subject? How to perform promiscuous knowledge without losing the plot?

John Durham Peters: Such great questions. I’ll give a variety of responses. Ken’s vision of the kind of Cheshire catlike quality of his writing was kind of an absurdist, utopian horizon. Never trust artistic manifestos!  This was a manifesto of the sheer minimalism that he dreamed for the book—one he knew was impossible and would never happen. And you’re totally right that the book enacts this tension, perhaps most clearly in Chapters Two and Three. Chapter Two argues that the 19th century was an era of copious culture, of the thick overflow of fact. And it was a period in which otherwise very diverse spirits—Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Graham Sumner—all reveled in the encyclopedic overflow of detail. Ken gives the example of Horace Greeley going to the London Crystal Palace exposition and coming back with pages and pages describing plows at a level of detail that for us seems utterly tedious. Chapter Three argues that modernism is less a question of fragmentation than of streamlining. This is one of Ken’s most interesting arguments.  Often when you think about modernist music, literature, and painting, you think of fragmentation. But there’s also Wittgenstein’s supremely austere early philosophy that famously ends in silence. Ken assembled all kinds of really interesting examples in the twenties and thirties—from taxidermy to Reader’s Digest to Georgia O’Keefe—where the interest is in synthesis, integration, cutting out all the overabundance. As a matter of cultural history, there is a big shift from 19th century abundance to early 20th century streamlining, but that’s also the tension of the book itself. 

Any act of history writing has to make really agonizing decisions about how much evidence is necessary versus what kind of storyline needs to come out. I often tell my students that a scholarly project is like going on a hot air balloon ride. You need enough hot air to take off, but you need enough ballast to make sure you don’t go into the ozone layer. This book was a constant struggle with how to keep the hot air balloon from crashing to the ground with the weight of the facts and to keep it from floating off with the hot air. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: It reminded me somewhat of DeLillo’s Underworld. It’s also about interweaving without simplifying, suggesting a connecting pattern without reducing it to one thing. That novel is often described as maximalist. I wouldn’t say that Promiscuous Knowledge is fully maximalist, but the sidebars definitely feel like an offer of more, one more container to caress or exceed . . .

John Durham Peters: Very good. The historical period is perhaps the ultimate container for historians, but Ken wanted the coverage to be spotty, jumping from the 1870s to the 1880s, the 1920s to the 1930s, and then 1975 to 2000. He left readers to infer what was missed. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Here’s a predictable anthropologist question. I was especially intrigued by the discussion of Bateson and Mead and role that the National Cultures Project played in relation to what you describe as a broader embrace of “happy summary.” As you point out, the synecdochic understanding of “national culture” underwent many assaults and was heavily critiqued in the later 20th century, both from within anthropology and more broadly. But it also feels like, at the same time that the culture concept was critiqued, it migrated into all sorts of other domains. Would be fair to say that, in some sense, the culture concept (and maybe many other concepts) underwent a simultaneous denigration and overvaluation or proliferation, as was the case with the image? I’m thinking about how culture and cultural difference are now being mobilized in very different ways—ways that feel like a bizarro resurrection of the national culture concept. 

John Durham Peters: I defer to you as an anthropologist to comment on culture, but in Promiscuous Knowledge we blithely declare that the idea of national culture is as dead as a doornail. We were mostly right within the academy, but totally wrong elsewhere if you think of culture wars or resurgent nationalisms of various kinds. Back to Benedict and Bateson (first time as theory, second time as farce). 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: I certainly don’t want to speak for all anthropologists, but my sense is that other analytics have come to the fore. (Although Marshall Sahlins, for one, argues for the continued significance of culture.) As anthropologists have moved to other analytics, I wonder if there’s been a relinquishing of ground that’s left space for much cruder understandings of culture, or where “cultural difference” becomes a proxy for race or ethnicity.  I’m thinking of what’s happening in the UK right now, but also in Germany, in the US…

John Durham Peters: Hungary, Israel, China, India, everywhere.

Robyn Taylor-Neu: So, I don’t know whether some of the important critiques of monolithic, homogenous national culture have left a space for other kinds of resurgent nationalisms or simplifications—a return of synecdoche with a vengeance?

John Durham Peters: Beautifully put. Do we like synecdoche or not? That’s the real question.  Ken did have a kind of fondness for mid-century synecdoche such as classical Hollywood cinema. He worried about the collapse of the national center, about people not being willing to pay taxes for the welfare of their fellow citizens. He thought we needed the synecdoche of national belonging to have an operative welfare state. You don’t want to break apart the abstraction of the nation state so thoroughly that people are just happy to say “I’m gonna keep mine,” which is very much what you see with Trumpism.

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Yeah. I found this argument around the welfare state and around the erosion of solidarity compelling. And this is also where it becomes a kind of tragedy, right? While recognizing that these contestations were really important, there’s a melancholy… But when I say, “a return of synecdoche,” maybe it just looks like synecdoche and is some other kind of rhetorical figure…

John Durham Peters: Bad synecdoche, your name is social media! You can sense a quorum with two or three people. One post (on Charlie Kirk or Palestine) can get you fired or deported.  Classic cases of parts substituting for wholes!  Social media platforms discourage statistical thinking (even while their code rests on it).  Readiness to take the part for the whole is really dangerous. And that’s exactly what Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk encourage with filter bubbles. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Definitely. I recently read an essay called “Fascistic Dream Machines” in the LRB and the author’s discussion of attitudes towards AI-generated images and videos struck me as a kind of a return to a different kind of happy summary… or unhappy summary, maybe. I was fascinated by your discussions of images across different moments. There’s the large move from the synecdochic image towards proliferation and fragmentation—what we could call a diremption of the emblematic image (following Hayden White). But there are earlier moments where you show many other ways to think about images. Could you say more about how the book recasts the relation between images and truth or putative reality? How is the book shifting or pushing against a simplified understanding of images as either having a kind of simple indexical relation to the real or no connection at all?

John Durham Peters: Gina Giotta’s sidebar on airbrushing in chapter 2 shows that intervention in the photographic process is itself coeval with photography itself.  The very first photograph has no people—it is an image of erasure, not of inscription. Daguerre’s process erased the sky and everything moving, except for one guy standing there on a sunny Paris morning getting his shoes shined. In the history of so-called realistic image making, we need to think inscription and fabrication side by side.  You can’t say that the image is the real thing.  For one thing, it’s much smaller than the streets of Paris. There’s much interest in a kind of consubstantiality, an indexical kind of tracing of the real, but photography has always involved craft and forgery. And even though Promiscuous Knowledge takes pains in chapter 4 to show a wide variety of photographic practices, we claim that you can still see a kind of family resemblance that allows you to contrast historical moments.  Today, for instance, it’s next to impossible to produce an iconic photograph.  Images just don’t resonate as they once did and it’s not just because of AI and Photoshop. It is just much harder to have a synecdochic picture that sums up everything.  Unless you’re an authoritarian declaring what it all (supposedly) adds up to—and even then, the pronouncements only hold as long as the next tweet or post. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: One of the sidebars that felt like a view onto a different understanding of images was the one about the Dutch still-life paintings. You describe the coexistence of different times in those works as a kind of montage—it’s almost cinematic, right, how the seasonally different flowers all appear in one painting?  I found that really fascinating as a departure from the usual discussions of photographic realism and indexicality. The Dutch still-life example felt to me like a really nice kind of counterpoint to that (somewhat exhausted) discourse.

John Durham Peters: Sergei Eisenstein had the great idea of vertical montage: superimposing different images within rather than between frames. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Right! And vertical montage also relates to the interleaving of sound, movement, image—all the modalities at once! Okay, last question. The project struck me as untimely in many ways, both in the sense of cutting across multiple times and seeking to “grasp the times by thinking against them” (to paraphrase Wendy Brown). There’s also the haunt of untimeliness: one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the times (and probably one shouldn’t). But as I was reading, I kept being struck by elements that resonate now, regardless their provenance—the 17th century or the early 20th century or the late 20th century.  There’s so much that feels super resonant with things I’ve been thinking about that are happening now.  How do you think about this book’s untimeliness or timeliness and where it pushes us, where it leaves us?

John Durham Peters: It’s always an exercise in constellation. Or a political and ethical question about how to build a relationship between past and present.  You’re always taking positions on grounds that are constantly shifting. Walter Benjamin’s great last essay on the philosophy of history famously contrasts two modes of history writing. One is a kind of chronicler of serial events, one thing after the other. The other he calls the historical materialist who intervenes in history and can produce simultaneities across time.  That’s really my secret goal, to produce simultaneity across time.  Simultaneity across space, of course, is one of the classic definitions of modernity: you can be in Berlin and New York and Shanghai at the same time thanks to a planetary telegraphic grid.  Benjamin calls this discovery of past relevance “Messianic time” or Jetztzeit.

Robyn Taylor-Neu: That’s where he talks about the Katzensprung (cat’s leap)—no, the Tigersprung (tiger’s leap) through time?

John Durham Peters: Yes!  Part of the strategy to end the book in 2000, rather than try to take it up to the present, was to reach for a somewhat stable moment.  Although, you know the old joke of Zhou Enlai? Someone asked him what he thought of the French Revolution and he said, “too early to tell.” History’s never done. We never know what’s coming. A packrat copious mentality banks up material against future relevance—there’s the temptation to stockpile an overflow of factual ballast again.  But the idea that we can discover history “wie es eigentlich gewesen” is clearly something that this book renounces. This book is explicitly creative and open about taking positions and looking for wormholes, looking for connections between past and present, creating them. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Maybe this was implicit in my question about form—this constant dialectical impulse in the form of the book, mirrored in the tension in photography between artifice and realism (if one can even keep those things as two poles). I do feel that so many aspects of the book felt dangerously resonant… 

John Durham Peters: Yes please!   

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Well, maybe all resonance is potentially dangerous! Specifically, I see a kind of return of summary, but not a happy summary. You can’t find a thing on Google that doesn’t give you the AI summary first.

John Durham Peters: I guess the perverse return of summary can be banal and annoying as well as dangerous. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Well, thank you. I think we’re at the pumpkin mark. 

John Durham Peters: I’m curious if you have any questions about the process the untimeliness of writing with someone who died a long time ago.

Robyn Taylor-Neu: That was definitely part of the question. But I didn’t want to ask directly because I didn’t want that aspect to overshadow what the book does in itself. Your conclusion is very moving and from what you say, it felt to me like Ken was someone that anybody would be incredibly lucky to know and learn from and be in conversation with.

John Durham Peters: Yeah, very true. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: And your discussion of inheriting his library! I really enjoyed the whole book.

John Durham Peters: Thank you. It’s such a joy to talk to you, just in general, but to have a good reader of the book, because you can imagine how a book appearing in March of 2020 fell with such a thud. People had other things on their mind.  Talk about an untimely birth!  So, it just basically vanished as far as I can tell. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: I think many things that came out in that one or two year period just sort of disappeared.  But reading it now, it feels especially resonant. So many of the threads opened up in different chapters feel like they come together in different knottings here and now. You say somewhere towards the end that if this had been just your book, it probably would’ve had more about the technological systems working behind our backs. That feels like something that is clearer now than in 2000 or even in 2020.

John Durham Peters: Totally! Thank you for the conversation.