Technology&Media&Rhetoric

Infinite Detail: Before and After as Dissoi Logoi

This handout sets-up our reading of Tim Maughan’s novel Infinite Detail: the context in which (and why) we are
reading it and the content of the novel—what it does and how it does it—that makes it worth engaging. In short, the
novel helps us think simultaneously through issues of media and technology while providing a means, a rhetoric, with
which to do that thinking.

The Context
The kinds of questions we pursue in this course admit of several possible answers. The kinds of question about which
people can and do disagree. At this point in the semester you are being asked to think through such questions in a
systematic way. The goal of this thinking is not to come to a single conclusion, but to think through various possible
conclusions as rigorously as possible. So, how do we do this? Our chosen method is the dissoi logoi, which is an
ancient Greek phrase that means something like “contrasting arguments.” Around 400 BCE, an unknown author
penned the Dissoi Logoi, which assumes that rhetoric begins with the ability to see an issue, question, or problem
from many perspectives. To illustrate its point, the Dissoi Logoi offers
several examples. The author writes that it’s bad for you if your shoe
falls apart, but it’s good for the cobbler. In war, victory is good for
the winners, but bad for the losers. In a tongue-in-cheek moment, the
author writes that death is bad for the one who dies, but good for the
undertaker. To compose a dissoi logoi is to toggle back-and-forth
between and even among possible positions.

The Content
Infinite Detail ambitiously and ambivalently traces the end of the
internet. Ambitious because of the breath and depth of the novel:
from RFID-tagged soda cans and their impact on homelessness to the
logistics apparatus that keeps container ships flowing around the
world like red blood cells. Ambivalent because of how it treats the
internet—a totalizing force that moves through everyday life in both
subtle and obvious, helpful and harmful, ways. Living before the end
of the internet is to live under constant surveillance by both the state
and corporate entities; it is also to live in a world were romance can be
cultivated across the ocean in real-time. To live after the internet is to
live with food insecurity wrought by the collapse of logistical and
infrastructural networks; it is also to live in a world wherein local
collectives might be able to self determine their futures. Additionally
compelling and productive, the novel toggles back and forth between
“Before” and “After” the internet. This narrative device renders the novel as a kind of dissoi logoi about the internet.
Neither “Before” nor “After” are presented as unquestionably good states; they are presented as different states
with different sets of relations, technologies and practices. Reading Infinite Detail—and having had read it—one is
never quite able to settle on how they finally feel about the events of the novel and about the virtues and vices of
“the internet”; there is simply an infinite number of differences that one must sort through one at time. The novel
thus isn’t simply about the internet but about the myriad technologies and techniques that render our lives both as
they are and as they could be.

Nathaniel A. Rivers | English1900 | Technology, Media and Rhetoric | Fall 2019