A Large Number of Something: Proliferation, Now

Abstract

DESPITE THE UBIQUITY OF THE PHRASE going forward with its implicit commitment to an idea of progress as an advance through time and space, contemporary North American culture is arguably increasingly characterized not only by matters of propulsion and velocity (or, as was discussed in a 2016 forum in Esc 41.2-3, Fast Evil) but of proliferation. Where North America's earlier industrial capitalist settler discourse put to work tropes of mechanization, automobility, space travel, and, most recently, digital communication to account for changes to human experience in terms of the speed at which could--and, often, should--be done, such tropes are becoming almost quaintly anachronistic in the face not only of technologies of speed but of the mass of what is moved at those speeds. For instance, according to a January 2017 report, an estimated three hundred new hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (36 Mind Blowing [sic] YouTube Facts, Figures, and Statistics--2017), a volume of text that is well beyond what can be watched by anyone in one lifetime. And of course YouTube is not the only site of such proliferation. Texts and data proliferate everywhere on the Internet. Since television shifted partially from broadcasting to streaming, that medium too has exploded as an archive--or even a thing that can be intimately known by an individual viewer. The digitization of print continues to add more textual material to more fields of study, even as print culture itself proliferates. New genres such as blogs and podcasts are rapidly increasing in range and numbers. Keeping up in any category has become virtually impossible. And if proliferation has affected data, texts, information, entertainment, and archives, it is also a factor in the academic workplace. Job descriptions in this context have become catalogic; tasks for individuals studying, teaching, and researching have multiplied. Like North American culture more broadly, workload at North American institutions is comprehensible less in terms of pace (how fast you can go) than of volume (how much you can do). For most people working in an academic context, or, indeed, perhaps most contexts, I suspect proliferation does not feel like a good thing. Proliferation is what your email does in your inbox when you do not check it for a few days, what student assignments do on your desk or on your computer when you do not grade them quickly enough, what deadlines do when you cannot meet them, what tasks across the registers of academic service and professional and disciplinary volunteerism do when you open your email. Defined in the Oxford Living Dictionary (online) with a compelling expansiveness and indefinition as both [a] large number of something and [r]apid increase in the number or amount of something, proliferation is the state of things behind the state of things in the everyday of the academic workplace and, I am guessing, in many others. That is, while you are attending to one thing, things are rapidly increasing somewhere else, and it is certain that you are aware of that rapid increase, your anxiety growing exponentially closer to panic as you recognize the certain proliferation of somewhere else. For me, this condition of apprehending the uncontrollable reproduction of that will in some way require time and attention once you have some of either of those things to direct toward it takes clarifying shape in the otherwise relatively undemanding video game Candy Saga, in which a player does battle with sugary elements (chocolate, frosting, jelly, jam) whose effects on the psyche, as in real life on the teeth, is not benign. In some of the hundreds of levels (the levels themselves proliferate) of this and other Candy Crush games, a player is called upon to simultaneously eliminate one element (jelly, frosting) while also preventing the proliferation of another (usually, I am very sad to say, chocolate). Although it might be expected that a game called Candy Crush would provide a relatively soothing occupation between other proliferating tasks or while waiting for a bus or a dentist's appointment, the effect of the levels in which you are battling a foundational and systemic problem (jelly to be cleared! …