About this Site

Overview

Indexical devices––those footnotes, indexes, encyclopedic collections, and databases––play a vital role in shaping how readers and researchers consume knowledge. From the level of the subject heading to the graphic design of a footnote, these tools serve to organize, store, and retrieve information in a text. These modes of information management not only shape the material form of knowledge, but the forms in which information is communicated. Yet these “paratexts” or reference texts are not traditionally thought of as texts in their own right. Turning to look at the form and history of these devices raises a number of questions: Is the index a genre? Do research devices have an affective dimension? Is there an “information aesthetic”?

The Indexical Imagination: Documentary Aesthetics and the Literary History of Information Culture pursues these questions across four centuries through a comparative study of four texts –The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1754), Hard Cash (1863), The Arcades Project (1927-1940), and Cyc (1984-2014). This project is not a comprehensive history, but rather, an archaeology that traces two elusive literary and informational concepts–reference and indexicality. From Charles Reade’s use of the footnote to link his novel, Hard Cash with a network of documents on real world medical practices and asylum abuse to the ways the index in Sir Charles Grandison invites the reader to become a “Carver” of the book, I analyze these devices not just as tools in the service of the literary text, but as historically-specific iterations of what I call the “indexical imagination.” In my analysis, I examine how these information technologies came to fashion and were fashioned by their historical context, and how their formal structures and aesthetics that emerged from this process, in turn, shaped the forms of knowledge they produced in the ways that they point, order, link, and cite. This examination extends into structure of the project itself: as a kind of embodied critique, my thesis takes the form of a website that calls attention to the ways we navigate, curate, consume, and produce information through a series of micro-essays that can be read linearly and non-linearly through the use of the site’s navigational devices.

The Indexical Imagination

Michel Foucault opens The Order of Things with a description of Borges’ infamous “Chinese encyclopedia” in which

animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.¹

Reading this strange and absurd fictional catalog, Foucault makes a now-familiar but important move in both philosophy and history of science: he calls attention to and unsettles the “fictions” that naturalize information devices and the ways they communicate knowledge about the world. He points to the artifice and arbitrary nature of this encyclopedic taxonomy as a frame for his larger archeological project: unearthing the epistemological groundings for modern systems for classifying and organizing information. For Foucault, there exists a direct relationship between the larger epistemological project of knowing the world and the material attempts to name, order, structure the world through encyclopedic projects that aimed “to reconstitute the very order of the universe by the way in which words are linked together and arranged in space.”² Knowledge structures are power structures: they are never neutral, but, instead, are caught up in the discursive production of power and knowledge within technologies for classifying, ordering, and controlling the external world. Within Foucault’s schema in The Order of Things, the encyclopedic object––encyclopedias, indexes, taxonomic tables––occupy a position of tremendous power as one of the primary mediums in which the classical fantasy of absolute knowledge develops into the modern hierarchal, standardized ways of organizing knowledge.

Yet despite tracing varying objects for ordering the world and beginning his inquiry with an examination of a catalog (albeit a fictive one), Foucault pays surprisingly little to the material receptacles for knowledge themselves. These material objects become subsumed as mere signifier the larger conceptual projects that they aspire to. A re-reading of the imaginative Borgesian catalog, however, suggests the need for a more sustained engagement with the material forms themselves. In Borges’ catalog, it is the material accumulation and ordering of different arbitrary taxonomic categories and their presence together in the catalog that illustrates the degree of absurdity of its conceptual ordering schema. Borges’ clever play with alphabetic enumeration in the design of his list illuminates a commonality of all informational objects: namely, that all such information devices always and already negotiate the problem of how to imagine structures for ordering and navigate information by virtue of existing in discursive mediums. What these navigational devices show is that, from the start, in addition to conceptual ones, there are practical, material, and aesthetic imperatives behind knowledge management.

One way of building upon Foucault’s theories of power and the order of things that better accommodates the material reality of these informational devices is to attend to what Foucault mentions in passing: “the way in which words are linked together and arranged in space.” The process of gathering together references, documents, and words is what Jacques Derrida termed, one of the powers of the archive

the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event.³

Theorizing this fluid relationship between “archivable” content” and the structures of archiving, Derrida points to the practice of “archiving” as itself both a conceptual and a material act. He describes “archive fever”––or the nostalgic desire for the archive––as constituted both by the physical structure of the archive and its cultural imaginary. Thinking about the ordering of words and documents in this manner opens up a space for engaging with these material, aesthetic, and conceptual dimensions not in fixed conceptual relations (the rigid hierarchy of Foucault’s order) but as situated within a dynamic interaction between material and imagined orders of things.

To carry out this investigation of the material orders of things, I focus on the index and indexicality. The index contains the documentary dimensions of the Derridian archive: as a device for pointing, assembling, classifying, and referencing the world, it requires as part of its conceptual apparatus the imagining of a larger web of documents in which these practices of linking, referring and classifying might occur. Even as they point and refer elsewhere, indexical devices come to constitute their own documentary repositories. This dual nature of the index and its structure of reference makes it an ideal touchstone for understanding this larger set of ways for understanding and imagining information that pervade in both the specific historical moments I examine and in the contemporary information economy. Grounding this study in both the philosophical conception of the index and its material history as an artifact in knowledge production, I attempt to locate the contemporary theoretical questions raised within information science and its modes of management in a much longer intellectual history. Within this history, I attend to the specific ways in which the makers of these informational devices recursively re-imagine the possibilities for indexicality.

Index Myths

This thesis attempts to critique two things: the notion that the index is a neutral object and the notion that the history of indexes and indexing practices is one of increasing systematization and standardization.

For Michel Foucault, standardization and systematization emerges as the uniquely modern form of absolute knowledge, and this particularly systematic notion of knowledge management comes to be fully realized in the 19th century. Turning to the 19th century itself, however, a more nuanced picture emerges, one that offers a more flexible and less systematic image of knowledge devices and the types of knowledge they contain and produce. In his 1878 pamphlet, “What Is An Index?” Henry B. Wheatley draws out a plan for a General Index of universal knowledge, one to be compiled by the newly formed Index Society:

The object of the General Index is just this, that anything, however disconnected, can be placed there, and much that would otherwise be lost will there find a resting place. Always growing and never pretending to be complete [emphasis added], the Index will be useful to all, and its consulters will be sure to find something worth their trouble if not all they may require.” ⁴

Wheatley, an avid indexer, emphasizes the importance of such a master index for efficiently organizing text,⁵ an “accurate reference against forgotten work”⁶, as a memory aid and device “national in their importance.”⁷ What’s fascinating about Wheatley’s conception of the index is that its universal aspirations seem to flag it as a prime example for the systematic, totalizing conception of knowledge that Foucault describes, yet, a closer look at Wheatley’s own description shows an index that is never as totalizing as Foucault would imagine. As an object that is “always growing and never pretending to be complete,” Wheatley’s conception of the General Index exhibits a form of information management grounded not in a systematic totality, but, rather, in a malleable model that accommodates new knowledge. Wheatley’s index serves as merely one instance of many in which the objects today taken to be systematic or static tools for total knowledge were actually far more dynamic and complex.

Looking more broadly across historical periods, the creators of information management systems aspire to something like an ideal index akin to Wheatley’s General Index. This impulse toward indexicality characterizes the aesthetic of large-scale documentary projects. Jumping from the 19th to the 20th century, we see a description of information technologies and methods of reading with aspirations similar to Wheatley’s device. In 1949, in search of a way to track the use of preposition “in” and the notion of “presence” in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, Roberto Busa begans developing methodological system for using punch cards (and then magnetic tape) in algorithmic indexing. Busa aspired to create

A general file of all the words appearing in the works of St. Thomas. Each card in the file will contain in the upper left hand corner, a specific word used in the text of St. Thomas. Below that will be given the exact reference to the place in his text where the word appears, with a quotation of the sentence in which it is found. Such a file would need about thirteen million cards…⁸

He follows this with a request for technologies that might be used for his project and then re-used for any general concordance: “such mechanical devices […] would serve to achieve the greatest possible accuracy, with a maximum economy of human labor.” Busa finally succeeds in using early computing programs to compile the massive concordance, the Index Thomasiticus in the 1950s, which finally completed on magnetic tape and then on software in 1980. Long after the completion of his index, Busa himself has come to be thought of one of the forefathers of humanities computing.

What I want to underscore in Busa’s story is the parallel between Busa’s desire for an efficient, extensible method for compiling vast, comprehensive amounts of information and Wheatly’s imagined, general index. Putting the two next to one another illustrates the importance of how we imagine information technologies even as we build, use, and reinvent them. Both Busa and Wheatley bring us into the space of a utopic “general index.” Extremely granular and impossibly-exact, this ideal index exists as an always-deferred horizon for the organization of information. Busa and Wheatley share several key characteristics that emerge in the negotiation of indexing technologies: a value for information that is readily accessible and, by extension, a value of information, and the desire for an information storage structure that is at once totalizing and extensible. These elements constitute the conceptual horizon for information management technologies, what I will call here “the indexical imagination.” Parsing out the different components to the indexical imagination in these examples illustrates how both the idea of index and indexed knowledge as well as the material work of the index are always and already more complex than merely systematic forms of knowledge and forms for knowledge. For Busa and Wheatley, what might appear to be a tool systematic knowledge organization actually consists of a much wider assemblage of practices: the work of memory, a process of accumulation, a reading practice, and the ordering of knowledge.

In the chapters of this thesis, I discuss how we might re-read the indexical imagination and its epistemological, material, and aesthetic implications at and in different historical milieus. In each element of this site, I examine the way that different technologies and indexical devices engage with the indexical imaginary. In some cases, such as Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, this technology of information management takes the form of an actual index. But the phenomenon that I am studying extends and proliferates in other information management technologies ––the footnote, the card catalog, and the database. Here, what I want to emphasize are the ways each tool and creator works within the space of the indexical imagination, and how each iteration of the indexical imagination helps articulate different, historically specific ideas of the value of information as articulated through the material objects of information devices. Thus, the individual chapters are neither case studies nor exemplars, but rather, re-readings of the indexical imagination both at particular historical moments (the historicist perspective) and as part of a larger, longer history (the historical materialist perspective).

Indexicality

In order to examine the practices at play in the indexical imagination, it is useful to have a clear definition of “indexicality.” After noting the fact that the word “index” has itself had a changing definition and has historically referred to a number of different forms of information management,⁹ Wheatley offers this definition for the modern index:

“an index is an indicator or pointer out of the position of required information, such as the finger post on a high road, or the index finger of the human hand”¹⁰

Wheatley gives a rather straightforward and practical definition of the index as a kind of navigational tool, explicating his definition shows how the index might be extended describe “indexicality” as a two-part concept:

1. a practice of indicating or pointing out;
2. a relational link to required information

These two parts to the index open up the theoretical and epistemological questions raised by this device. In focusing on the index, this thesis will attempt to address these dual functions by moving across the fields of literary criticism, semiotics, and the philosophy of knowledge, book history, history of science, and the history of reading.

To indicate or to point is a semiotic action. Also writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Saunders Peirce expands on the act of pointing in his proto-semiotic theory of signs. In this semiotic trio––icon, index, symbol––– the index has a special material, existential status as “a real thing or fact which is a sign of its object by virtue of being connected with it as a matter of fact.” ¹¹ For Peirce, the second type of sign

…signifies its object solely by virtue of being really connected with it. Of this nature are all natural signs and physical symptoms. I call such a sign an index, a pointing finger being the type of the class.¹²

The index asserts nothing; it only says “There!” It takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and forcibly directs them to a particular object, and there it stops.

Peirce continues, noting that sign “would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant.¹³

Peirce gives us two key formulations for talking about indexicality: the idea of proximity and physical connectedness and the notion of an object that points with his index that speaks and says “There!” Both characterize the index as something physically or existentially connected, capable of referring to its object only through a physical, existential, or factual link. Elsewhere, Peirce notes the ways that the index exerts a bodily, physiological affect on its perceiver.¹⁴ Peirce emphasizes the index’s affect on the viewer––the embodied experience of perceiving the index. Peirce’s attention to the pointing function of the index opens up a plethora of possible objects that “symptomatically” indicate: Peirce includes the bullet-hole, the weathervane, a photograph, a pointing hand, pronouns, and deictics on his list of sundry object that function as indexes.

The theoretical implications of the second part of the index––the ways the device links to required information––are taken up in Suzanne Briet’s work on the process of documentation. Writing at the height of the European Documentation movement in the early half of the twentieth century, Briet includes in her essay, “What is Documentation?” the definition of a “document” as “any concrete or symbolic indexical sign [indice], preserved or recorded toward the ends of representing, of reconstituting, or of proving a physical or intellectual phenomenon.”¹⁵ Briet’s definition speaks to a larger milieu of documentalists–librarians, archivist, nascent information scientists–interested in the idea of the document as an index, a form of reference embedded in cultural practices and a web of other references. I explore Briet’s work more fully in my chapter on The Arcades Project but here I want to call attention to Briet’s larger point about documentation. In the recording and preservation of Briet’s “concrete or symbolic indexical sign” lies the power of the documents to link the physical object and its document into a large network of documented objects, which are, Ronald Day observes, themselves linked in a web of documentary practices and tied to a twentieth century institutionalization of the methods for organizing and managing materials. ¹⁶

I focus on the index because the logic of indexicality gives us a good vocabulary for describing the two sets of epistemological issues raised by “indexicality,” and played out and in the material relations between the objects, documents, and devices of information management. Peirce’s emphasis on the material connection between the index and the object it points to and Briet’s emphasis on indexicality as a sign linking physical document, make strikingly clear the relationship between the form of information management and forms of knowledge. Indexicality, by virtue of “pointing” or linking, allows for a different vocabulary than that of representation; it provides a way of discussing how knowledge comes to be produced and constituted without subsuming it under the powers of the sign or the relationship of signifier and signified. To index is not to represent but rather, to point, to mark, and to link.

The Sociology of Reference

”The act of referring places a sentence or corresponding proposition in contact with an actual circumstance by means of an indexical device.”¹⁷

To discuss the two levels of indexicality in Peirce’s abstract theory of “pointing” indexes and Briet’s network of documents in indexical practices requires addressing a second set of practices: that of reference. I want to first clarify what I mean by “reference.” If indexicality is the quality of a pointing device and a link in a nodal imaginary of documentation, reference serves as the mechanism by which this process is carried out and the entity that is indexed is made present. Elaine Freedgood notes that in literature, the character of reference doubles. In a novel, poem, or play, reference refers itself both to “connection of a word to something in the world” and to “authorized information.”¹⁸ As words on a page, these references present the problem of being both markers and evidence, they paradoxically document by pointing elsewhere while also furnishing evidence within the frame of the text.

The doubled character of reference as both a connection and the piece of information itself is a key for understanding how the idea of reference––and, by extension, indexicality––is constructed. Just as indexicality is a question of social practice, a reference is a social object. Who and what is cited or collected in the process of indexing reflects upon and is embedded in political and social structures of power. Reference is also a social practice in its production of the “real” or the “actual circumstance” to which it refers. Writing about the use of soil samples in Brazilian rainforests, sociologist Bruno Latour describes the scientist’s attempt to preserve an indexical chain in a literal trail of evidence linking back from the scientist’s laboratory to the rainforest. Latour zooms in on the social and epistemological processes required for the idea of reference and for the actual material used to carry it out. Latour notes “the word ‘reference’ comes from the Latin referre, ‘to bring back’” then asks, “Is the referent what I point to with my finger outside of discourse, or is it what I bring back inside discourse?” ¹⁹ What Latour calls “circulating reference” points to the economy of referentiality and indexicality, one present and active in the management of reference and the preservation of indexical meaning through decidedly non-mimetic means. Pairing Latour’s take on reference with the dual functions of the index, we see that the social production of reference required for “indexical chains of meaning” is one of making present the referred-to object by enclosing and possessing it. A reference must be pointed to as external, but only functions within an economy of meaning once it has been “brought back” inside discourse.

This tension between the social production of reference and the material processes by which the documented object is made present, as Latour notes, are contingent and socially constructed. Reconsidering both indexicality and the process of reference forces the critic to confront certain naturalized hierarchies of meaning, namely, the implicit distinction between the “mechanical” objects of reference and the organic, hermeneutic objects of analysis. Readers often overlook the technical, denotative language of reference used in indexical devices, privileging the conceptual over the literal. ²⁰ This distinction between technical/denotative language and creative/figurative language creates “a division of reading labor,” as Elaine Freedgood points out. This division of labor privileges what is recognized as interpretable: either footnotes or indexes that are used to tell a literary story, as in readings of Nabokov’s Pale Fire or Jennifer Boully’s The Body ––otherwise, they are instrumental, naturalized as non-interpretable.

As a goal, this thesis seeks to complicate and extend this sociological critique of the idea of reference through how it manifests in indexical devices. In each of these chapters, I seek to challenge, or at least read against the grain of the assumption that informational devices are instrumental and “mechanical” and that the literary text as an interpretable object is separate from the devices through which we locate, access, and store it.

Information Aesthetics: Totality and Extensibility

This thesis directs attention back to the materiality of information devices. By highlighting the ways that the indexical imagination of these information management technologies are always and already aesthetic, I intend to challenge the traditional history of indexing practices as a process of becoming gradually more standardized, arguing that these practices were never as totalizing nor as uniform as they are made out to be. One of the ways in which I do this is by focusing on the material history of texts, pairing the epistemological issues of indexing devices alongside their practical use as devices for reading and navigating a text. The aesthetic and stylistic choices serve a practical purpose: to help a reader navigate, read, or re-read a text. As Johanna Drucker observes, graphic design and its navigation tools “connect the space of navigation and narration, these directings and orderings shape what we can imagine the space of narrative to be.”²¹ The shape of these “directings” and navigation technologies thus come to constitute and create the forms of the knowledge they convey.

These indexical devices all bear their own aesthetic logic, made manifest and material through visual cues to guide the reader through the text. The index that points and says “There!”, the logic of the photograph, the bibliographic reference included in a text, the visual link of the footnote’s asterisk to its corresponding twin at the bottom of the page, entry labels–– on the one hand, these devices serve a navigational and practical service. They organize, orient, collect and help move the reader through the text. The visual appearance of an entry label (or an index entry, or a footnote) are often enumerated, both convey the notion of a countable sum of objects. The use of numbering, in the index and in the footnote, in particular, signal the presence of a larger system. From the number or the alphabetized index, the reader infers the existence of a range of numbers or alphabetical entries. In addition to pointing, the index and the documentary device thus prime the reader to experience documentary information and evidence at a mass scale.

As I discuss in my opening to the “indexical imagination,” even in devices that ought to function as the most totalizing example of information system ––Wheatley’s General Index and Busa’s Index Thomasticus––instead exhibit a dialectic between totality and extensibility or flexibility. The dual tensions of totality and extensibility play out as conceptual principles and through the aesthetics and ethos of information itself. The social performance of the idea of indexical information and its social value, I argue, come to be made by aesthetic and affective dimensions. What’s at stake in this thesis is how the cultural production of information and the idea of information are mediated by aesthetics and material forms of information management devices. I focus on the “indexical imagination” in texts that are, for the most part, seen as canonically literary. Doing so helps stage the re-reading that I’m performing of information devices, as viewing the unfamiliar object–indexed fiction–– best illuminates the fictions of indexical documentation, as total, comprehensive, or valuable. In my section on Cyc, I depart from “literary” texts to illustrate how reading a “machine” shows the ways in which the practice of indexing is seen as related to and producing a conception of a mechanical mind.

Reading Instructions

To read this thesis, you, the viewer, have three options. You can navigate by individual chapter, and by hyperlinks within the text itself. Scrolling through each chapter, you can read linearly, as you would a traditional academic monograph. You can use the table of contents toolbar to view, navigate, and synopsize each chapter. Downloading the bookmarking or annotation app Diigo allows you to highlight, index, and tag the site on your own. These navigational devices do not just function to make the thesis main text navigable and able to be read in multiple ways––they are designed to call attention to the devices themselves. By making the process of indexing, organizing, and curating more legible, and by representing the table of contents and bookmarking tools in a away that calls attention to their design and format, the project carries the critical awareness of role and politics of aesthetics of information to the level of the reading experience itself.

The sections are each organized around a specific text. In the chapter on Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandson, I explore the role of indexing practices and the eighteenth century novel. Looking at the ways that Richardson uses his two indexes of the novel, I argue, forces us to reconsider our assumptions about both the rise of the index as a “standardized” object and the rise of the novel as an object that a reader navigates linearly. In my chapter on Charles Reade’s Hard Cash, I examine the ways that Reade’s footnoting practices create both a research effect and research affect as they locate the novel vis-à-vis Reade’s own massive archive of research. As I approach Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, I argue that Benjamin’s indexical imaginary for the project, his specific use of card catalog-esque numbering for his fragmentary collection, allows us to locate Benjamin in a far more historicized conception of twentieth century documentation practices. In my chapter on Douglas Lenat’s Cyc I attempt to reframe indexical storage technologies in the context of a “strong AI” project. By drawing a connection between artificial intelligence software and indexing technologies as constituted by the tensions between extensible systems and totalizing structures. Each of these chapters, however, is structured around the principle of iterative re-reading and can be read both linearly and nonlinearly.

The Form of the Project

The project is an inter- and cross-disciplinary: I examine the literary history of indexing practices from the perspective of a literary criticism informed by a historicist attention to particular and localized practices, and I also examine the material history of this information management practice as part of a longer, broader history that includes baroque information aesthetics, the documentation movement, and cybernetics.

The transhistorical nature of this project requires at least two caveats. This broadly-scoped project is not interested in tracing is a linear path of continuity or a genealogy of indexicality from 1754 to 2014. But neither does it put forth an ahistorical view of information technologies. Rather than taking case studies or exemplars of the whole, my projects centers on the act of re-reading that emerges from the indexical imaginary of information devices. Looking at specific historical sites, I negotiate both the aesthetics and material history of devices used to order and organize information, as well as the philosophical and epistemological ideals underpinning the use of such technologies in order to show how the broader ideals of indexicality––and its twin tensions of extensibility and totality––are deployed, constituted, and remade at different historical moments.

I explore this process in both the form and the content of the site. By engaging with the aesthetics of information consumption through the web and graphic design of my essay, I ask the reader to rethink assumptions about the standard or systematic use of information technologies. By taking the form of an academic honors thesis, the project aims to speak to a longer academic tradition of bibliography, history of science, history of reading, and information studies in order to illustrate the ways in which digital studies does not exist in isolation from the intellectual labor done in previous traditions. In framing my thesis I have opted for a compromise––maintaining the thesis’ legibility as an artifact of academic scholarship and argument while reflecting on how the ways we write, the ways we read, and the ways we present this knowledge are embedded in cultures, practices, and politics of knowledge production.

In approaching a longer history of information technologies through the lens of form, the form of this thesis reflects the production, circulation, and reception of contemporary knowledge. To call attention to how the dialectic between extensibility and totality is tied up in issues of design and the ways we curate, read and experience knowledge, my individual chapters are structured as “iterative readings”, a form in which I explore different reading protocols––surface readings, descriptive readings, distant readings, and suspicious readings––that might be read recursively and in conversation with one another, rather than attempt to generate a mastering theory of the indexical imagination. By deploying the space of the footnote, the index, and the table of contents in my site, I underscore the ways that my argument unfolds through the practice of iterative re-reading that recognizes the mutually continuative work of information management, information aesthetics.