Indexing it all: The Modern Documentary Subsuming of the Subject and its Mediation of the Real

Abstract

This paper summarizes some of the themes of my forthcoming book, Indexing it All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (forthcoming, MIT Press). The paper presents research on the history and theory of the modern documentary tradition in the 20th and into the 21st centuries, which it views as an episteme with three dominant moments: European Documentation, Information Science and Data Science. In this paper, European Documentation, citation analysis, social computing, android robotics, and social big data are discussed as cases in the dialectical movement of this tradition. Each stage of this development represents higher levels in the subsumption of human agents and texts within increasingly abstract documentary forms of representation. Documentary indexing and indexicality have been major and increasing sources for the social positioning of persons in modernity, with consequences for personal and social psychologies, politics, and for critique and judgment. The story of the modern documentary tradition is a story of the role of indexing (personal, social, and textual positioning through documentary techniques and technologies) and indexicality (the modes of documentary citation and reference that result in such), and how this has shaped and continues to shape what Suzanne Briet termed, “homo documentator” (Briet, 2006).