How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information by Thomas S. Mullaney; W. W. Norton, 240 pp., $26.99
“You can’t step in the same river twice.” Heraclitus’s adage is true not only because the water that constitutes the river is ceaselessly flowing but also because “you” are never the same from one moment to the next. Cells and atoms disintegrate, and individual human selves are enmeshed in a vast cosmic vortex in which nothing ever remains the same. “Our bodies are deciduous things,” writes Thomas S. Mullaney. And so is everything else.
How We Disappear assigns primacy to entropy—the impulse to disintegrate—over coherence. In the operations of the universe, disorder is the norm, according to Mullaney, and “we owe our sense of continuity to the fact that our bodies and brains are constantly muttering bedtime stories to themselves.” The story that he tells, of unavoidable gaps and incessant flux, seems a departure from his scholarly work as a historian of modern China. However, by examining “how some things struggle to stay together, how everything comes apart,” he is exposing the inherent imperfection of trying to make sense of the past. It is not so much that history abhors a vacuum; historians do, and their professional task is to fill the void with narrative.
Beginning with the aftermath of his father’s death, Mullaney anchors his ruminations on evanescence in details of his own family. A dutiful son, he is summoned from California, where he teaches at Stanford University, to Maryland to care for his ailing parents. A sudden death leaves him to deal with his late father’s material effects—cartons and cartons of flotsam accumulated over the course of a life that began in 1945: documents, clothing, all the miscellaneous objects that constitute what Mullaney calls the “diaspora” of any human being. Organizing it into an archive, similar to the curated collections in which he conducts his scholarly research, he must decide what to discard and what to retain. What order does he impose on the latter? He notes that a 76-year-old male would have emitted 24,000 pounds of feces, 85 pounds of dead skin, 40 feet of hair, 10 feet of fingernails, and 9,000 gallons of urine. Even for lives that are archived, most of their diaspora disappears. How to arrange what remains is moot. Eventually, it will all, like the mighty Ozymandias, disintegrate and evaporate. As Marx and Engels observed, “All that is solid melts into air.” Sunlight might indeed be the best disinfectant, but open air is a potent agent of entropy, dissolving documents that are exposed to it.
Mullaney’s father accrued a crushing debt that threatened to erase him, and his mother offers further lessons in how to disappear, not just in her attempted suicide. After her death, he learns that she had concealed the fact that she—and therefore he, too—was Jewish. This discovery forces him to rethink his entire family narrative and realize that there are mysteries about his parents and himself that he will never understand.
Pennies and deutsche marks disappear, languages cease to be spoken, and once-popular technologies are abandoned. Over time, many hieroglyphs, wax cylinders, and computer codes have become indecipherable. No Rosetta Stone has been found to make sense of unrecoverable scripts such as Minoan Linear A, the Harappan script of the Indus Valley, or Easter Island’s Rongorongo. Floppy disks, Betamax videocassettes, HD DVDs, and other orphaned formats survive as fossils that cannot easily be revived. A connoisseur of obsolescence, Mullaney explains how new technologies promise permanence but merely produce novel ways of disappearing.
Reviewing the history of photography, which promised a stable, reliable record, he writes that images fade and fail as adequate documentation. Sound recording, film, fingerprinting, and even DNA patterns are similarly imperfect as accurate and enduring testimony. According to Mullaney, “Sites of production are always sites of disappearance—every act of recording is also an act of not recording everything else.” Vast bureaucracies (the Census Bureau, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS) have been created to reduce the messiness of personhood to statistics, but some shards of humanity always evade quantification.
Entropy can occur by accident, but it often acts according to plan. Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is a common biological mechanism. The example that Mullaney cites is the way in which the hand of a human fetus initially develops amphibian webbing until, at an appropriate time during gestation, the webbing cells die off and yield to individuated, movable fingers. The artificial obsolescence built into consumer products—video game consoles that don’t support older accessories, smartphones that reduce performance as batteries age, clothing outmoded by newer styles—are other examples of a world designed to be in flux.
To anyone in love with the precious, fleeting things of this world, resistance to disappearance seems natural and proper. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” Dylan Thomas implored his dying father. Although he certainly does not advise suicide, Mullaney seems more sanguine about the inevitability of disappearance. “It is only by making peace with entropy—conceptually, albeit never physically—that we can understand continuity and coherence for what they are,” he writes. “Marvelous and strange.” Making peace with entropy means accepting its primacy and adopting a kind of Buddhist resignation to the inevitable. Instead of attempting a futile war against decay and disintegration, Mullaney urges us to study it. “Rather than lamenting oblivion, what if we chronicled it, unsparingly. To ask, simply: How do we disappear? Could we become students of entropy, examining it—not with a World War II mindset of ‘Know Your Enemy’—but with the unflagging patience, suspension of judgment, and dogged empiricism of a researcher”? In How We Disappear, Mullaney does exactly that.
