In the first five pages of The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters says that media are
- “devices of information”
- “agencies of order”
- “constitutive parts of … our ecological and economic systems”
- “vessels and environments”
- “containers of possibility that anchor our existence”
- “vehicles that carry and communicate meaning”
- “the means by which meaning is communicated”
- “infrastructures of data and control”
- “enabling environments that provide habitats for diverse forms of life”
- “civilizational ordering devices”
It’s obvious that these definitions, while sometimes complementary, are also sometimes fundamentally incompatible: a device that is also a vessel that is also an anchor….
So I set the book down and thought for a while. Then I picked it up again, and thumbed through it. I saw some pages about clocks and sundials, and some others about clouds (the clouds of the book’s title, I presume), and some others about Google. The pages on timekeeping looked good, but I’ve read a number of books about timekeeping already. I couldn’t tell, at a brief glance, about the others.
I looked at those opening pages again. Three possibilities presented themselves to me. The first is that Peters is a demanding, allusive writer who works not by some ploddingly systematic outline but rather by a Shandean association of ideas. The second is that he actually has a logical outline but prefers, either for aesthetic reasons or because he values esoteric writing, to obscure it and to allow his readers to figure out the structure for themselves. The third is that his thinking is simply disorganized and incoherent.
Some of the best books I have ever read — fiction and nonfiction alike — have been governed (or “governed”) by Shandean procedure: Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; but that style demands a great deal of readers, and when it fails it fails catastrophically. I have been exhilarated by a few Shandean books; I have been infuriated by a great many that attempt that style without success. The same is true for works (Joyce’s Ulysses is the paradigmatic example) that are highly ordered but hide their organizational principles.
When you’re trying to decide what to read you do a (formal or informal) risk/reward analysis. You think about how much time and attention you’re being asked to invest in this text; you estimate the rewards you’re likely to get in a best-case and in a worst-case scenario. I did all that and put Peters’s book aside.
My first reaction was that Peters is given to poetic, PoMo mumblespeak, which aims more at feeling than accuracy. However, on reconsideration, I recognize that many fields have their own stylized internal language, such as the way lawyers speak to each other, or academics, or marketers, or management gurus, or feminists, or criminals. Within any of these contexts, terms and phrases carry nested meanings that are, as you point out, often incompatible. To scrutinize this stylized speech invites frustration. Conflicts are often irresolvable but also unimportant.
My experience with books written in an esoteric style is limited, but I find them unusually difficult until at last things clarify (if I don’t first put down the book). Spengler and Feyerabend spring to mind. Spinoza may also qualify, but considering the period and language gulfs to be overcome, that assessment may be questionable.