Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History

by Kenneth Cmiel, John Durham Peters

Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, however, Google’s divine omniscience traffics in news, maps, weather, and porn indifferently. This book, begun by the late Kenneth Cmiel and completed by his close friend John Durham Peters, provides a genealogy of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google. It examines how we think about fact, image, and knowledge, centering on the different ways that claims of truth are complicated when they pass to a larger public. To explore these ideas, Cmiel and Peters focus on three main periods—the late nineteenth century, 1925 to 1945, and 1975 to 2000, with constant reference to the present. Cmiel’s original text examines the growing gulf between politics and aesthetics in postmodern architecture, the distancing of images from everyday life in magical realist cinema, the waning support for national betterment through taxation, and the inability of a single presentational strategy to contain the social whole. Peters brings Cmiel’s study into the present moment, providing the backstory to current controversies about the slipperiness of facts in a digital age.  A hybrid work from two innovative thinkers, Promiscuous Knowledge enlightens our understanding of the internet and the profuse visual culture of our time.

336 pages, Hardcover

Published February 27, 2020

Reviews

[Alexander Monea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ken Cmiel (posthumous) and John Durham Peters' latest book on the history of how people have approached the avalanche of information and images throughout modernity is an excellent read. It combines thorough historical investigations with illuminating examples and case studies (often contained in sidebars) all written in approachable and captivating prose. Perhaps most important, this book speaks to the present and demonstrates how these historical entanglements produce our contemporary and paradoxical approach to knowledge, wherein we continue to value and produce information and images at enormous rates, despite consciously giving up on the possibility of any synthetic totalization (an expert that can explain it all to us from above or an image that can represent us generally).

Perhaps because of the dual (and posthumous) authorship, it is difficult at times to tell whether this book functions as a cabinet of curiosities or a curated exhibit with an intentional narrative arc. The lay reader will find it peppered with interesting trivia and insights into different ways of knowing and being that have structured everyday life in the Western world. The academic reader will find familiar ground made uncanny by the addition of new insights and perspectives, reshaping how we might understand the well trodden history of facts and images.

Lastly, in writing this book, John Durham Peters completed a project that Kenneth Cmiel had been working on intermittently for years before his untimely death. The sophistication, reverence, and humaneness with which Peters treats this collaboration is beautiful. His meditations on what it means to co-author with the dead were, for me, perhaps the most moving and fascinating aspects of the book.

In short, I love this book and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a general history of how we've handled the glut of information and images over the past few centuries or looking to find new examples, insights, and perspectives on this well trodden ground.