Canonicity and Radical Indifference

automatiquement le 26 Avril 2024 Canonicity and Radical Indifference Valeria GenneroThe literary canon, a small section of the larger body of texts that academic scholars refer to as "literature", is a highly controversial corpus.The emergence of canonicity in institutional discourse was instrumental in defining the so-called "culture wars," a phenomenon that reached its climax in the last decade of the twentieth century and is now back as a crucial concern in the humanities.After comparing some of the assumptions shaping past and present debates about canonicity, I will argue that, in the age of digital media, professional disputes about what is worthy of being read and taught are being usurped by a data-driven populism that thrives on outrage and polarization.This regime is indifferent to the distinction between truth and lies; it disdains complex rational discussions of validity claims, and it is therefore incompatible with democracy.Throughout this essay, I borrow the expression "radical indifference" from Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019).In her outstanding book, Zuboff defines surveillance capitalism as the unilateral claiming "of human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data" (p.8).This raw material is obtained every time anyone accesses the internet.Most online interactions are tracked, and data are then inspected and transformed in "prediction products", a precious commodity ready to be sold into the "behavioral futures market": this is how these predictions become available to business customers interested in knowing what drives the decision-making process.Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and Messenger) are the main companies involved in the commerce of behavioral data, and, as of 2023, a meaningful role is also played by social platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter) and TikTok.Zuboff argues that these corporations constitute a political-economic institutional order capable of controlling most digital information.Tech giants are thus in the position to exert a transnational influence that puts every democracy at risk:In result, the liberal democracies and all societies engaged in the struggle to build, defend and strengthen democratic rights and institutions now stumble toward a future that their citizens did not and would not choose: an accidental dystopia owned and operated by private surveillance capital but underwritten by democratic acquiescence, cynicism, collusion and dependency (Zuboff, 2022, p. 3).