Proliferation's Ends

This paper begins with a confession that may descend into whining cliché. Writer's block was a more significant problem with this paper than I can ever remember it being. Part of that, no doubt, had to do with the proliferation of tasks great and small in the lead-up to the 2016 accute conference, of which this forum was a part—that's the whining cliché, complete with unnecessary but obligatory reference to the forum's theme—but part of it definitely lay in my inability to discriminate among the many proliferations on which I could pedantically pontificate. And so what I might have here is a series of beginnings rather than a specific end in mind.

My second beginning is the latest iteration of the tried and true topic sentence, "The Oxford English Dictionary defines proliferation as": in this case, "I Googled proliferation …" Specifically, I performed two sets of Google searches: one a search for the combined phrases "proliferation of" and "in Halifax"; the other a Google ngram search for proliferation, combined with various other terms. Much like the oed definition, these searches are relatively interesting but deeply flawed research tools, but still I learned a few things. For instance, looking at just random and initial hits, it would seem that Halifax has seen, both today and in its history, a proliferation of bars, of crime, of bootlegging (combining the first two), of taxes (adding to the proliferation of bootlegging, perhaps), of private charities, of churches, of gunplay, of gmos and brew pubs and pizza places and condos. My favourite though, was in an article in a Halifax paper but about San Francisco game development culture, where I read about the "proliferation of interesting, unique, possibly totalfailure ideas," where "totalfailure" was both one word and a sign of success ("Game Makers").

The ngram search, meanwhile, like all overly quick ngram searches, provided a wealth of data devoid of context. "Proliferation" as a term took off in the mid-nineteenth century, when it was primarily a medical term, to an exponential rise between 1950 and the mid 1990s, possibly with the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the discussions thereof; there was a brief plateau in the mid to late 1980s, when the world was in the heady days of glasnost; this plateau seems to have reasserted itself in the 2000s, perhaps when the scientific winds of apocalyptic prediction shifted to climate change.

But, that's actually less than half-informed speculation as to cause, because other proliferations also proliferated in this period: media, of course proliferated from the modernist period through to now, with an explosion, as they say, following the digital revolution. My use of Google for both my web search and ngram graph is but one isolated instance.

And so my third beginning is to argue that the specific example of media proliferation can become a synecdoche for all the other proliferations, because the only thing that ever actually proliferates is noise: noise in the form of error, in the form of entropy, in the form, ultimately, of the heat death of the universe, depending on how far one is willing to take things. Because if you take the ngram search back far enough, what you find, as with any ngram search, is error. There's a spike in the use of the word "proliferation" in the seventeenth century, but this is actually an artifact of misread scanned text, where legal materials, from the un and the Maine Legislature, among others, are identified as seventeenth-century texts. My favourite of these is a 1960 treatise titled Automation and the Worker: A Study of Social Change in Power Plants, misidentified by Google's automated reader as being published in 1625.

But now with the discovery of noise and the end of this universe I find myself at a fourth beginning: proliferation has less to do with the inflation of noise than it does with the expansion of discrimination. Proliferation is to judgment as the big bang is to black holes, in other words. Proliferation is the always extant cultural ground against which restrictions of judgment (be they of...