When Tom McCarthy’s essay about “fiction in the age of data saturation” posted earlier this month on The Guardian website, a number of writers picked up on the image of James Joyce working for Google:
If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google, and if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter since the operations of that genius and vision are being developed and performed collectively by operators on the payroll of that company, or of one like it.
There’s more going on in the essay, though, than just a thought-provoking image of literary corporate absconsion. Throughout the essay, McCarthy draws connections between the ethnographer/anthropologist (like Claude Levi-Strauss) and the novelist (thus James Joyce). For McCarthy, the anthropologist is “the writer stripped down to the bare structural essentials. You look at the world around and you report on it. That’s it.” And so the conclusive book of the anthropologist equals the novel that might capture the spirit of an age. Now, though, the task of telling the story of a people is falling into corporate hands, as organizations hire their own anthropologists, “deploying ethnographic knowledge to help [them] achieve deeper penetration of their markets, to advise cities how to brand and rebrand themselves, and governments how better to narrate their policy agendas.”
From the paragraph where James Joyce was mentioned:
That last term – narrate – should bring this whole discussion back to the point it never really left. As for the world of anthropology, so for the world of literature. It is not just that people with degrees in English generally go to work for corporations (which of course they do); the point is that the company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed. While “official” fiction has retreated into comforting nostalgia about kings and queens, or supposed tales of the contemporary rendered in an equally nostalgic mode of unexamined realism, it is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones.
While fiction writers are in a particularly precarious boat (surrounded by way too much data to process), the same is true for the average citizen on 21st century Planet Earth. Everyone’s got a story to tell, and they’re telling it all the time through multiple platforms. And the powers behind those platforms are soaking it up. In turn, we are having our stories tweaked and told back to us as marketing. We are providing the fodder for others to be our anthropologists. As McCarthy says early in his essay, “the tribe is us.”
If you get a chance, read the essay. It’s a good challenge. McCarthy talks a good bit about particular authors and anthropologists. The piece is also a good introduction to what you will find if you read Satin Island. Both remind us that we have turned digital technology into (perhaps) our final story-telling apparatus and that we have made it that way by giving it so much information about us. The story of our lives, indeed.
Space Enough, and Time 