[Linganth] John Durham Peters on the CaMP blog

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog John Durham Peters answers Robyn Taylor-Neu's questions
about his book with Ken Cmiel, Promiscuous Knowledge.

www.campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect
search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous
knowledge, however, Google’s divine omniscience traffics in news, maps,
weather, and porn indifferently. This book, begun by the late Kenneth Cmiel
and completed by his close friend John Durham Peters, provides a genealogy
of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google. It
examines how we think about fact, image, and knowledge, centering on the
different ways that claims of truth are complicated when they pass to a
larger public. To explore these ideas, Cmiel and Peters focus on three main
periods—the late nineteenth century, 1925 to 1945, and 1975 to 2000, with
constant reference to the present. Cmiel’s original text examines the
growing gulf between politics and aesthetics in postmodern architecture,
the distancing of images from everyday life in magical realist cinema, the
waning support for national betterment through taxation, and the inability
of a single presentational strategy to contain the social whole. Peters
brings Cmiel’s study into the present moment, providing the backstory to
current controversies about the slipperiness of facts in a digital age.  A
hybrid work from two innovative thinkers, *Promiscuous Knowledge *enlightens
our understanding of the internet and the profuse visual culture of our
time.
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