Global Encyclopedia

Globalization operates as an encyclopedic form of knowledge of which the internet is of course the ideal media. With globalization, we all get to rove around uncovering and learning tidy bits of knowledge from faraway places without putting them into any grand historical context.

We get to talk about one or two moments in history, connect them through a network and then draw some striking conclusion about a different previously unrelated matter. The kind of dialectical juxtaposition Walter Benjamin nurtured in his Arcades Project, where the commodities sold in nineteenth-century Parisian side streets revealed something about the rise of Hitler, is now acceptable across the globe, so long as one has a theoretical model that allows us to make an article about Kojak reruns in Thailand explain post-Vietnam War economic relations in South East Asia.

The other side of encyclopedic knowledge is the potential for fakery. You don’t have to be an elaborate forgery to assert knowledge. You just merely need to have read an article or two on the subject. Expertise feeds the encyclopedia. Without some scholars who know the particular field, you would not have a convincing article on Wikipedia, but once the article is on the internet, there is room for endless circulation and appropriation. We can claim knowledge of Shanghai city planning while sitting in Illinois.

Eighteenth-century Europe was full of such armchair experts. Everyone who could read devoured travel literature about places far from Europe. Immanuel Kant lectured for years on anthropology without having left his hometown. Christian Wolff could generate treatises on a host of subjects not just one or two. Being learned meant knowing a lot about many things. We are again floating into such an encyclopedic phase. It is refreshingly interdisciplinary. We all get to hold forth like a contemporary English professor, who can teach a seminar on Hitchcock or Kafka. We get to spin historical connections like a German philosopher of old, compare Chinese history to Egyptian in 22 deft pages.

As an old Medievalist once told my multilingual friend—you’re either brilliant or a fraud. Alas the majority of us will just be panting to keep up.