Of Instagrammatology

Abstract

“Of Instagrammatology” starts with a trip to India I took with my wife in 2019 as the starting point for a meditation on the experience of time passing. I recount my attempt to finish reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time on the trip, having read the first two thirds over thirty years ago, while in India in my mid-twenties. This allows me also to reflect upon the extraordinary technical and cultural changes that have taken place in the interval between these two trips, especially in terms of communication. I suggest there is a connection between how I have found myself using technologies such as Instagram and Proust’s own concern with the lost instant, and that both are manifestations of what Galen Strawson calls the “episodic self,” and which is also found in some Buddhist philosophy. Finally I look at the idea, first found in Borges’ story “The Library of Babel,” and now instantiated online, that every moment of time, both in the past and in the future, is, in some sense, already describable in the infinity of Cantor’s Aleph Zero