Abstract
In this article, in distinction to documentation as an epistemic understanding of documents, I will discuss the epistemology of documentality as an indexical theory of documental functions, which I will develop through Bruno Latour’s notion of information. This notion of indexicality is different than Suzanne Briet’s notion of indexicality (which I have discussed elsewhere (Briet, 2006)). I will begin this paper with an historical problem that illustrates the issues of viewing documents as content representation. This is the problem identified by Vincent Debaene (Debaene, 2014) in early and mid-twentieth century French field anthropology of the “two book” phenomenon, which attempted to address a perceived epistemic distance between lived experience and its representation through scientific documents. The solution to this problem of presence and representation was the writing and publication by French anthroplogists of a second, more literary, document after the production of the scientific paper or book, which supposedly represented the experience of the anthropologist and the group under study more fully. I will argue that both texts, however, followed genre conventions and practices, which are neither more or less faithful to an original experience. I will argue that the notion of an original experience reflected in the content of the text misses the performatively indexical relationship of text to world and the role that this plays in scientific and other forms of documentality. In short, what Vincent Debaene identified as the French anthropologists’ quest for producing a “living documents,” which closes the gap between life and documental representation, is a Quixotic task, since the problem is not real but rather is a product of the epistemology of re-presentation, which forecloses from our understanding what really happens with scientific and other documents.
Highlights
There is a fundamental distinction between a traditional bibliographic understanding of books and other documentary forms as 1) imitative (“mimetic”) containers for meaning and reference, and as 2) a materialist and performative understanding whereby documents in their social circulation and cultural forms are studied as ways for constituting meaning and reference
Documentation studies, in the mode of Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet’s works, the two most studied figures in what has become known as 20th century European Documentation (viewed in the Library and Information Science (LIS) tradition as a predecessor of, and in the tradition of, Information Science), follows what I am calling here a traditional bibliographic epistemology.2 (for example, Otlet’s (Otlet, 1934) insistence on centering what he termed “documentology” on “the book,” understood as referring to both the material form of books and an idea of the book as a material container for representationally constituted knowledge.) In this bibliographic tradition, documents are understood as re-presenting the world through their contents
As I have previously discussed (Day, 2001), the works of these early and mid-20th century figures of European Documentation are rightly positioned as predecessors of later 20th century “information science”, insofar as the epistemic understanding of information as content representation is historically shared throughout this period, from European documentation through information science proper
Summary
There is a fundamental distinction between a traditional bibliographic understanding of books and other documentary forms as 1) imitative (“mimetic”) containers for meaning and reference, and as 2) a materialist and performative understanding whereby documents in their social circulation and cultural forms are studied as ways for constituting meaning and reference. Documentation studies, in the mode of Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet’s works, the two most studied figures in what has become known as 20th century European Documentation (viewed in the Library and Information Science (LIS) tradition as a predecessor of, and in the tradition of, Information Science), follows what I am calling here a traditional bibliographic epistemology.2 (for example, Otlet’s (Otlet, 1934) insistence on centering what he termed “documentology” on “the book,” understood as referring to both the material form of books and an idea of the book as a material container for representationally constituted knowledge.) In this bibliographic tradition, documents are understood as re-presenting the world through their contents.
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