OLDNESS: A NEW IDEA

In one sense, the explicit output of academic work is the production of new ideas, new theories, methods, findings, and conclusions. Yes, new stuff.

Yet, what is old is a major source of power (and pride) for academic work. It has become almost axiomatic that the creation of newness only happens by the creative appropriation and re-application of things that already existed, e.g. sampling and remix.

Sometimes scholars argue that our obsession with new things has gone too far. Social scientists enter into contemporary debates which forget that what is new remains connected to what is old. With historical perspective, they argue that the Internet extends telegraphs, radio was wireless before there was wi-fi, youtube is in some ways like VHS, images made of pixels are like mosaics. Indeed, the very absence of historical perspective in these discussions is telling, they argue. This obsession becomes pathological when we, in our love for what’s new, forget what is now old, forget the way “old” and “new” function as labels generally, and ignore the connection between what is new and what is old.

So the argument goes, everyone is too obsessed with things that are new, and should really pay more attention to the past.

I’m reminded of the scene from The Dark Knight when an employee figures out Bruce Wayne is Batman and then announces his plan to blackmail him. If he’s right, then he’s wrong. (Don’t fuck with Batman.)

To diagnose our obsession with newness and offer historical perspective as a corrective should itself be seen as a new contribution. A retcon. It freshly re-visions history with sensitivity to the current world (in approximately our current terms). Arguments against newness, in specific contexts, are making new interventions.

Example: David Golumbia finds a way to doubt the goodness of computers by declaring all of history to have been an information age:

We have always lived in an information age; we have always relied on networks for communication; we have always used computational systems for the management of large-scale aggregations of human beings, material things, and whatever we want to call information; it is only by focusing almost exclusively on the tools we have in front of us that we can imagine the products we are using today are revolutionary.
The Cultural Logic of Computation p. 215

The pose of newness, or its effect, is strategic in discussions that have grown old and which insist that the old is always old and only the new ever new.