A historical-conceptual account of the different genres, technologies,
modes of inscription, and innate powers of expression by which something
becomes evident.
In this book, Ronald Day offers a historical-conceptual account of how
something becomes evident. Crossing philosophical ontology with
documentary ontology, Day investigates the different genres,
technologies, modes of inscription, and innate powers of expression by
which something comes into presence and makes itself evident. He calls
this philosophy of evidence documentarity, and it is through this
theoretical lens that he examines documentary evidence (and
documentation) within the tradition of Western philosophy, largely
understood as representational in its epistemology, ontology,
aesthetics, and politics.
Day discusses the expression of beings or entities as evidence of what
exists through a range of categories and modes, from Plato's notion that
ideas are universal types expressed in evidential particulars to the
representation of powerful particulars in social media and machine
learning algorithms. He considers, among other topics, the contrast
between positivist and anthropological documentation traditions; the
ontological and epistemological importance of the documentary index; the
nineteenth-century French novel's documentary realism and the
avant-garde's critique of representation; performative literary genres;
expression as a form of self evidence; and the "post-documentation"
technologies of social media and machine learning, described as a
posteriori, real-time technologies of documentation. Ultimately, the
representational means are not only information and knowledge
technologies but technologies of judgment, judging entities both
descriptively and prescriptively.
