Kenneth Cmiel (1954–2006)

Ken Cmiel (posthumous) and John Durham Peters' latest book on the history of how people have approached the avalanche of information and images throughout modernity is an excellent read. It combines thorough historical investigations with illuminating examples and case studies (often contained in sidebars) all written in approachable and captivating prose. Perhaps most important, this book speaks to the present and demonstrates how these historical entanglements produce our contemporary and paradoxical approach to knowledge, wherein we continue to value and produce information and images at enormous rates, despite consciously giving up on the possibility of any synthetic totalization (an expert that can explain it all to us from above or an image that can represent us generally).

Perhaps because of the dual (and posthumous) authorship, it is difficult at times to tell whether this book functions as a cabinet of curiosities or a curated exhibit with an intentional narrative arc. The lay reader will find it peppered with interesting trivia and insights into different ways of knowing and being that have structured everyday life in the Western world. The academic reader will find familiar ground made uncanny by the addition of new insights and perspectives, reshaping how we might understand the well trodden history of facts and images.

Lastly, in writing this book, John Durham Peters completed a project that Kenneth Cmiel had been working on intermittently for years before his untimely death. The sophistication, reverence, and humaneness with which Peters treats this collaboration is beautiful. His meditations on what it means to co-author with the dead were, for me, perhaps the most moving and fascinating aspects of the book.

In short, I love this book and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a general history of how we've handled the glut of information and images over the past few centuries or looking to find new examples, insights, and perspectives on this well trodden ground.… (meer)