Disinteresting

I’ve been thinking about the links/representations of a conference called Interesting 2007 every since Boynton linked to one of its speakers. My first reaction was abject horror: “Everything is NOT interesting.” I thought of writing some polemic, but it wasn’t until AKMA linked to the Simpson’s avatar generator (just as Boynton had the week before) that I was jolted into writing this. I make a conscious effort to not be too curmudgeonly; I can remember having a debate with arch-curmudgeon Dr. Earl Ramsey at UALR on the same subject around six years ago. At that time, I argued the position of the librarian at I Like—now, I find myself more sympathetic with Ramsey. Intellectual habits change.

I was arguing with Ramsey regarding the approaches of Susan Sontag and Michel Foucault, which involve taking a HUGE bite out of culture and then writing about it—I’ve always felt that polymaths have all the fun. Why not be interested in everything? Ramsey’s argument was simple: life is short, and to attempt to read/study everything simply results in frustration and being half-assed (I paraphrase loosely). It was his position that Foucault was simply a shoddy scholar. Sontag, on the other hand, was at least interesting because she did not favor grandiose claims—though the majority of us could not hope to sustain her reading regimen. I wasn’t ready to surrender my desire to read everything just yet. Now, I may have finally come around to that.

The danger of accepting the facile position that “everything is interesting” is that it obscures the selective nature of consciousness. If everything was interesting, we would have never made it down from the trees; e.g. if a rock or tree were as interesting as a tiger about to make a meal out of you, evolution of the human race would have stopped in its tracks. Or, to use a non-secular example, if a freeway were as “interesting” a place to worship as a church, pilgrims bowing to Mecca might have more salient problems than persecution.

The study of the everyday, promoted by I Like and many others (including me), is important simply because it is not interesting, because it falls (or has historically been) below the threshold of our cognitive apparatus. To declare the commonplace “interesting” undermines the basic premise of any scholarly work. This grates on my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard, because it reduces an important pursuit to the level of cliché “It’s all good”—if it were all good there would be no need to work against poverty or injustice, now would there?

I Like’s post rails against the problem of judgments regarding the worth of one area over another, suggesting that all human pursuits have value. Easily granted, in fact that was the impasse I reached with Ramsey. But is it interesting to me? We don’t all have time to cook up regrettable recipes, or to trawl swap meets. I, for one, am thankful for those who do—but it isn’t as “interesting” as say, affecting the future of governments or furthering science. To move forward, some specialization is important. But the role of the “compiler” of materials that they find interesting (read librarians, collectors, or people who just record everyday experience on blogs) should not be understated.

My wife delivered a paper this morning at the SHARP conference about the nature of encyclopedic authorship which cuts to the core of some of these problems. A compiler offers the choice of multiple paths through the material they find “interesting” or “important” which allows us to reevaluate just what meaning we make from the raw material of the world. An encyclopedist (which is probably the most interesting type of blogging I know) offers up fragments removed from the mainstream of the world (or dipped from the middle of the current) allowing us to skip across an otherwise confusing sea. The polemicist offers endless opinions (as long as they are relevant to the writer’s own), but such directed writing always reduces the level of agency held by the reader. The encyclopedist, on the other hand, sacrifices the ability to convey their own opinion (in a coherent sense) because opinions are always fragments trapped within the matrix of some organizational scheme that is not so clearly navigated as the essay or polemic. Even discounting the multivocal group authorship of the encyclopedia, the presence of multiple entry and exit points defuses the ability of the author to declare that something is “interesting.”

I receive a lot of search engine hits for “interesting robot facts.” I’m sure that the surfers aren’t finding what they are looking for; the Robot, in the context of that entry, is a camera. Cameras are more interesting to me than robots, but apparently not to a lot of web surfers. The trajectory of that entry (which was one of many declarations that old camera advertisements are “interesting” that I’ve made by posting them) is out of my control. The unit of measure in a blog is ultimately the “entry” making those who compile a great number of them subject to the oddball constraints of encyclopedic authorship. Polemics are best kept short and tightly contained, but moments of interest can evolve into their own sort of identities giving some blogs a unique voice.

Aside: as I was looking for links to finish this entry, I found out that the photography curator of the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Ted Hartwell, is dead. Alec Soth noted that he was at home talking about photographers or cameras he had met. Cameras, generally, are only interesting to photographers. But my real curiosity is marked in this quote: “He probably could have gotten a job if he needed to as a dealer in a casino because he moved photographs around to find juxtapositions and resonances and complementarities.” As Friedlander remarks through his opening epigraph about gambling, assembly isn’t a matter that is best left to chance. It isn’t simply finding things interesting that’s important, it’s arranging them. To do that, one implicitly degrades other items to the status of less interesting. I struggle with the word “interesting” a lot, editing it out of most of my sentences when I notice it. To write that something is interesting is to state the obvious: why else would you be writing about it? Duh!

So then, why do I find my representation as a Simpson’s character’s, umm. . . , interesting? It’s not, really. Perhaps it is just that participation is commonplace enough to give a certain feeling of solidarity with others pursuing guilty distractions.

One thing I’d like to be absolutely clear about: though I violently disagree with the manifesto, I can really get behind the product being promoted by I Like : Nothing to See Here is the sort of alternative travel encyclopedia I’d like to see more of. I just wish the choice of available clichés were better. I would much prefer the equally fallacious punk cliché “everything’s boring” or to see myself as a character from William Blake. In the end, the sort of communal function served by the cliché should not be underestimated.