“La Manifestation,” Felix Valloton (1948)

“I worry that my fake ideas don’t even have time to reach the words stage, but remain a mere inarticulate drive to consume. In my media intake, momentum has replaced thinking.”

By Rob Horning

When I was a student, I had a deeply ambivalent attitude about the university library. I typically had some very vague research goals guiding my visits, so I would often let my search for a particular book take me on these winding peregrinations through the stacks, and I would gaze at all the titles, counting on pseudo-serendipity to strike: “Oh, that looks interesting, and that, and that…” But I would begin to feel increasingly agitated, helpless and overwhelmed — and overencumbered, as I would keep adding more and more books to the pile I’d be lugging around: books about the history of advertising on top of books about consumer-behavior theory on top of books about patent-medicine hoaxes and Wild West medicine shows on top of books on pottery factories in Northern England. As the reality would sink in that I could only carry so many books home in my backpack, I’d start reluctantly jettisoning them in a breadcrumb trail throughout the library on various reading desks and study tables I’d pass. They could lead me back out to the sunlight outside the building, but they also charted an intellectual road painfully not taken, so usually I chose to burrow in deeper.

Eventually I would find myself caught up in a specific shelf, a specific Library of Congress call number — BJ1388 (socialist ethics), PR3667 (scholarship about 18th century novelist Samuel Richardson) — and I’d pull each book out, examine it, flip through its index, wonder what sort of shortcut would allow me to absorb its relevance without having to check it out and read it. The palpable sense that there was so much more to know, the concrete proof of it bound up in volumes front of me, not only made it difficult for me to imagine leaving the library; it also made it hard to actually start reading anything. I wanted to stay there in the narrow aisle, facing the books forever, contemplating the spines, surveying Contents and Works Cited pages, poised in a moment of perpetual potentiality. As long as I didn’t commit to any one text, I could continue to fantasize about reading them all. Walking away from the shelf would be tantamount to surrender; I’d have to admit to myself how much there was that I would never know, how I was doomed to dilettantism.

This sort of library visit was somewhat counterproductive to my studies. I learned to evade that state of petrified fascination in the stacks only by avoiding the library altogether and ultimately by dropping out of school. But lately, the internet’s omnipresence in my everyday life has made it so that I can never leave the library, making me despair of ever really learning anything again. It has reopened the abyss of readily accessible information and made it easier than ever to skate on the surface of ideas, tracing their tangential connections rather than wrestling with any one of them in depth. Before I could block out the acute awareness of my own ignorance for long enough to get things done.

Confronted with the digital surplus, with the collective weight of all the knowledge that history has bequeathed and much more besides, I find myself yearning for limits but incapable of imposing them on myself. I become suddenly aware of having been born into an unearned plenitude, like one of José Ortega y Gasset’s ungrateful “mass-men” described in his 1930 book The Revolt of the Masses. An inveterate and unrepentant snob, Ortega argued that the 19th century’s technological innovations brought about a huge population increase in the 20th century, a barbaric, intellectually deficient mass that was the “automatic product of modern civilization” and was constitutionally incapable of appreciating the society in which it found itself.

There might be a deceptive tendency to believe that a life born into a world of plenty should be better, more really a life than one which consists in a struggle against scarcity. Such is not the case…. The abundance of resources that he is obliged to make use of gives him no chance to live out his own personal destiny, his life is atrophied.

Sunk in a mire of “self-satisfaction” and “radical ingratitude,” this new inert generation lacked the autonomy to strive for the “noble life” of ceaseless moral and intellectual struggle. “They are from birth deficient in the faculty of giving attention to what is outside themselves, be it fact or person,” Ortega asserts. “They will want to listen, and will discover they are deaf.”

Is that me, standing in the library, futzing with the books but incapable of selecting one to read? Or me, rapidly flicking through posts in my RSS reader, going through the motions of informing myself while avoiding confrontation with any ideas challenging enough to require more than 30 seconds to process? Is my life only now atrophying in a self-regarding flurry of tweets and status updates? Or did the mental decay set in years ago, when it first became clear that there was far more to know than I could even imagine?

Ortega claims that the mass-man “wishes to have opinions, but is unwilling to accept the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all opinion. Hence his ideas are in effect nothing more than appetites in words.” I worry that my fake ideas don’t even have time to reach the words stage, but remain a mere inarticulate drive to consume. In my media intake, momentum has replaced thinking.

Perhaps in Ortega’s epoch, when libraries were smaller, the “select minorities” with authentic intellectual ambition could through their “noble” striving, master all those conceptual presuppositions. But to have a genuine opinion by Ortega’s standards now, one would have to select a somewhat esoteric specialization to have any chance of feasibly mastering all the existing scholarship — reading, for instance, every single one of those books on Richardson on the PR3667 shelf, as well as the hundreds and hundreds of journal articles about his life and work, not to mention the limitless number of works on his intellectual and historical milieu. Because information is so accessible and so readily distributable, those presuppositions are growing exponentially, which means the specializations must become ever more narrow.

At some point, the niches will become so small that they will exclude everything that didn’t emanate from our own consciousness. It will be as Ortega feared. We’ll all end up qualified experts on ourselves, and nothing more.