The Ends of Reason: Documents, Evidence, and Powers
In this talk, Ron will outline a project that looks at the philosophy of what he calls documentarity: documents as evidence of what is. He will examine reductionist representation in the 20th century documentalist Paul Otlet’s theoretical works, indexicality in Suzanne Briet’s works, and ethnographic representation in Georges Bataille’s works on documents. This is preliminary work on a larger work on documentarity and beings.
Ron Day, Associate Professor of Information and Library Science, Indiana University, researches the philosophy, history, politics, and culture of information, documentation, knowledge, and communication in the 20th and 21st centuries in the U.S. and Western Europe and in the discipline of Library and Information Science. His writings include The modern invention of Information: Discourse, history, and power (2001) and Indexing it all: The subject in the age of documentation, information, and data (2014), which won the ASIST Book of the Year Award. For more information visit his web page.