Distracting me from my PhD, professional obligations over the past fortnight have led me into some literary territories I hadn't explored for a while. Firstly, some teaching duties led me to look at Roland Barthes' Mythologies for the first time since I was an under-graduate. Secondly, some consultancy work about online activism has meant I've been digging around in the web2.0 literature. I found myself beginning to view the latter through the lens of the former.
Any book seeking to capture the web2.0 non-fiction, possibly business, market needs to have the prefix 'every' somewhere in the title. Clay Shirky's (incidentally rather good) new book is called Here Comes Everybody, David Weinberger's contribution is called Everything is Miscellaneous, Don Tapscott's is called Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Then there are the offerings by the 'rogue economists' (yawn) such as Tim Harford's The Logic of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of Everything and Robert Frank (who really should know better, but is presumably being bullied by his publisher) with The Economic Naturalist: Why Economics Explains Almost Everything, and of course Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
I've whined before about this pastiche of Enlightenment, and laughed uproariously at The Greatest Book Title the World Has Ever Known (honestly: next time you need cheering up, just click on this link) but now I'm wondering if the word 'every' may perform some important mythological function in book shops, that makes it a sure bet from the perspective of publishers.
'Everything' is actually quite a meek term. It lacks the frightening Germanic metaphysics of the term 'the universal'. It doesn't even carry the weight of the more anglophone equivalent, 'the general'. Meanwhile 'everyone' doesn't force one in to the sorts of political dilemmas posed by the concept of 'society', nor the more ethical quandries of the term 'humanity'.
Promising to sort out 'everything' is the sort of offer a plumber might make immediately after declaring that your central heating is fucked. It's a pretty big commitment, and no doubt resource-intensive, but at the same time very reassuring. This is what these authors are doing: they are the analytical plumbers of the post-industrial age. Anxious clients enter Waterstones with a diffuse sense that something is wrong, only to exit again with a nice hard-back book that explains not just this something, but everything else at the same time. "I could simply bleed yer radiators mate", says Clay Shirky, "but you're far better off in the long run letting me deal with everything".
As Barthes might see it, the prefix 'every' is a little glimmer of absolution scattered around a book-shop. It carries none of the threat of metaphysics, but all of the comforts of finality. And most importantly, it gets the cash registers whirring.
Haha, great rant!
Posted by: Jonas | March 14, 2008 at 09:04 PM