University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Documents from Head to Toe: Bodies of Knowledge in the Works of Paul Otlet and Georges Bataille

Day, Ronald

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/101425

Description

Title
Documents from Head to Toe: Bodies of Knowledge in the Works of Paul Otlet and Georges Bataille
Author(s)
Day, Ronald
Issue Date
2018
Keyword(s)
  • Information science
  • Information
  • Embodied experience
  • Body
  • Epistemology
Abstract
This article contrasts Paul Otlet’s epistemology of documents with that of Georges Bataille’s in the late 1920s and early 1930s in regard to the body parts that they assign as sites and analogues for documents. A double meaning to the notion of documents emerges, defensive and offensive of and to twentieth-century European scientific epistemology, morality, and aesthetics: documents as the full and truthful representation of reality, and documents as the material inscription of social, cultural, and physical affordances leading to the reality of irrational drives. The brain as the site of the mind is said to be the physical location given to the former, and “the body” is the physical site given to the latter, reinforcing a traditional Western anatomical psychology determined by ideational and materialist ontologies and corresponding traditional bodily tropes for “reason” and “the senses.”
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press. The School of Information Sciences at Illinois. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Series/Report Name or Number
Library Trends 66 (3). Winter 2018
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101425
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2018.0009
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2018 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Owning Collections

Library Trends 66 (3) Winter 2018: Information and the Body: Part 1 PRIMARY
Library Trends 66 (3) Winter 2018: Information and the Body: Part 1. Edited by Andrew M. Cox, Brian Griffin, and Jenna Hartel