I School – UC Berkeley School of Information.

The speaker today was Bernd Frohmann, from the University of Western Ontario. He spoke to the the UCB I School about A New Theory of Documentation for Information Studies.
He is the author of Deflating Information: From Science Studies to Documentation He bases his research on a foundation of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bruno Latour, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

This lecture being based on the philosophical giants of the last hundred years was both exciting and daunting. A quote from Amazon, “Is disseminating information the main purpose of scholarly scientific literature? Recent work in science studies signals a shift of emphasis from conceptual to material sources, from thinking to doing, and from representing the world to intervening in it. Scientific knowledge production is no longer seen as a process of seeking, collecting, organizing, and processing abstract elements, but instead one of assembling the many different material ‘bits and pieces’ of scientific culture in order to make things work”. The subject is too complex for me to make much of a comment on the content.

However, my takeaway message from this lecture was that I am still stuck in the 18th century with the Scottish Enlightenment folks such as David Hume, Adam Smith and later Charles Darwin. These people were more filled with enthusiasm for life and finding workable solutions to problems. Those more recent fellows seem unable to follow on that overtly optimistic path—perhaps because it was so well covered—so they grasp at what seems to an outsider to philosophy, such as myself, to be self imposed defeatism. These people are searching for perfect answers, as did the Ancient Greeks, whereas the Enlightenment guys didn’t seem to believe there was a perfect world, only an imperfect world where struggle was rewarded but every success was followed by more struggle. There was no ideal society, or ideal philosophy, or ideal anything else—it’s all struggle followed by more struggle. But the struggle can be meaningful and enjoyable in its own way.