Inexhaustable Surfaces
On Italo Calvino's "Mr. Palomar," surveillence capitalism, and misdirected attention
How deep can a surface go? The question advanced by Italo Calvino in his short book “Mr. Palomar.” As the title suggests, the book is an intimate and unsettling portrait of its protagonist, Mr. Palomar, a man on a quest to intimately understand the world around him. To him the “surface of things is inexhaustible” whereby every object of observation is a limitless landscape to survey. His way of seeing is far from normative. In his tedious and circuitous descriptions, Calvino places us in the mind of an obsessive man tormented by endless attempts at cataloging his immediate environment:
“Mr Palomar has decided that his chief activity will be looking at things from the outside. A bit near-sighted, a bit absent-minded, introverted, he does not seem to belong temperamentally to that human type generally called an observer. And yet it has always happened that certain things – a stone wall, a seashell, a leaf, a teapot – present themselves to him as asking for a minute of his prolonged attention: he starts observing them almost unawares, and his gaze begins to run all over the details and is then unable to detach itself.”
Immaterial things are animate to Mr. Palomar because they make active demands from him, namely, his attention, which once attached to something is “unable to detach itself.”
What does that actually look like? Most of the book is an extensively drawn-out observation of banal realities. Take, for example, the instance Mr Palomar enters a Parisian cheese shop:
The cheese shop appears to Mr. Palomar the way an encyclopedia looks to an autodidact: he could memorize all the names, venture a classification according to the form – bar of soap, cylinder, dome, ball– according to the consistency– dry, buttery, creamy, veined, firm – according to the alien materials involved in the crust or in the heart – raisins, pepper, walnuts, sesame seeds, herbs, molds – but this would not bring him a step closer to true knowledge, which lies in the experience of the flavors, composed of memory and imagination at once. Only on the basis of this could he establish a scale of preferences and tastes and curiosities and exclusions.
Encyclopedic knowledge is Palomar’s ultimate goal. In the cheese shop, and in other quotidian landscapes, like a beach, a terrace, or anywhere with an unobstructed view of the night sky, Mr. Palomar takes to creating a model for his reality. A method of surveying, cataloging, arranging, and absorbing all of the innumerable characteristics of a place or thing, like the form, consistency, and contents of a litany of French dairy specimens (evidently an impossibility for anyone fortunate enough to step foot inside a French cheese shop).
After countless fruitless attempts at sense-making, the point when Mr. Palomar realizes you could scratch at a surface for a lifetime without ever abolishing it, he tries his luck at constructing a model for reality, a way to process the boundless information sense perception offers him. But even this scenario has its issues. “A model is by definition that in which nothing has to be changed, that which works perfectly; whereas reality, as we see clearly, does not work and constantly falls to pieces; so we must force it, more or less roughly, to assume the form of the model.” While Palomar is certainly misguided, he is certainly not an idiot. He knows that this stringent world-building, his attempts to make sense of everything by nit-picking it to death (model making) are useless given that models are inflexible, oppositional to the reality he is trying to grasp, fluid, and changeable.
Therefore the only alternative to modeling, and the only adequate way of structuring reality, is to “keep his convictions in the fluid state, check them instance by instance, and make them the implicit rule of his own everyday behavior, in doing or not doing, in choosing or rejecting, in speaking or remaining silent.” One would imagine this submission to fluid conviction and adaptability would finally offer our existentially anxious protagonist some reprieve, but no. Far from it. Trapped in his compulsive habit of attending meticulously to the inexhaustible surface of reality, Mr. Palomar gets so lost in the vastness of sensory information that in “contemplating the stars he has become accustomed to considering himself an anonymous and incorporeal dot, almost forgetting that he exists: to deal now with human beings, he cannot help involving himself, and he no longer knows where his self is to be found.”
At this point that we realize that all this time, Mr. Palomar has been lusting for a definition of self. Unlike contemporary soul searchers, those of us who think it crucial to first “find ourselves” to comprehend the world, Mr. Palomar has done the opposite: gone so far into his indexing of environment that he has lost himself. “The people he admires for the rightness and naturalness of their every word and every action are not only at peace with the universe but, first of all, at peace with themselves. Mr Palomar, who does not love himself, has always taken care not to encounter himself face to face; this is why he preferred to take refuge amongst the galaxies; now he understands that he should have begun by finding inner peace.”
In a scathing spiral towards inner peace, Mr. Palomar lands on a conclusion many of us would rather ignore: that inner peace most likely only arrives in death. Consequently, Mr Palomar decides he will learn to be dead, “to become convinced that your own life is a closed whole, all in the past, to which you can add nothing and can alter none of the relationships among the various elements.” Evidently, that backfires for him too, since, alive as he is, time remains the operative foundation of his experience. Pretending to be dead is not enough. Mr. Palomar must pretend that time has ended too.
“‘If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant,’ Mr. Palomar thinks, ‘and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can no longer be seen.’ He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.”
A life is made up of cumulative attention. But not all we pay attention to is necessarily remembered. Our life is the time spent attending to things that are processed into our inner schema, a narrative of how we interact with the world outside of us – the moments where attention teleological bears fruit.
Mr. Palomar cannot decipher what, in his expansive attention, is actually of purpose to his inner schema. His attention pushes past a productive threshold where it becomes neurotic. If one sees every object of their attention as vital, that data overload only leads to an existential anguish and anxiety. Attention ceases to be attention if it tries to absorb too much if it intakes the world as pure informational units. There is a difference between information and knowledge as contemporary digital-age scholarship suggests.
In his book Information: A Very Short Introduction, scholar Luciano Floridi says “knowledge is something that you acquire through a process of semantic information elaboration. The process requires justification, coherence, and reliability." Information cannot become knowledge until it is processed and contextualized, afforded a semantic meaning. Information on its own is a symbol without meaning, unable to be used and integrated into the decoder’s understanding of the world (is that a line with other lines jutting out from it or a tree, the thing we long to sit under when the sun shoots out its forceful rays?)
In later works like The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality, Floridi advances this argument a step further elaborating that not only does more information not lead to more knowledge, it actually can have the opposite effect, an overabundance of information works to actively pollute and impair our capacities for meaningful, knowledge advancing connections. While we have more information available to us than ever before, it does not mean our cognitive capacities to interpret that information have evolved at the same pace. When we don’t possess the means to properly filter, contextualize, and judge the deluge of information we encounter daily, our ability to generate “semantic capital,” the meaningful organization of information that bears knowledge out of its structuring, is gravely diminished.
Similar arguments are put forth by Katherine Hayles in her book My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, where she writes "when information is artificially divorced from materiality, we forget that meaning is created through embodied interactions, not abstract codes." While information can exist independently of bodies, knowledge, on the other hand, emerges through embodied experience, the processing of information through our senses, and the repository of lived experiences.
Samantha Zuboff further alienates information from knowledge in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism where she explains "the goal of surveillance capitalism is not only to automate information flows about us but also to automate us. We are no longer the subjects of information but its objects." In her account, information is entirely divorced from semantic potential. Information in the age of surveillance capitalism is a method for technocratic control.
Our tech overlords thrive off of the accumulation of our behavioral data, given to them for free when we use their platforms (Google, Meta, etc.). This aggregated data on our consumer habits overwhelms us as individuals and the institutions that govern us making it increasingly impossible – both on a personal level and a national level – to withstand their influence. As a result of the steady stream of targeted ads and attention fracking, behaviorally modifying information, we’ve lost the ability to make autonomous decisions. The present flood of data is our flood of Genesis, biblically drowning out the potential narratives we could use to orient ourselves within our lives.
We must reinstate our biological attentional capacity. We must take information, de-narrativized bits of our lived experience, and turning it into knowledge, a schema by which we can relate ourselves to the world around is. Because contrary to what tech-giants tell us to think, relationality does not exist from exhaustive information, but from things withheld, unknown.
In her essay “On the Grid” published in The Drift magazine, Zoë Hitzig poignantly articulates this necessity. Our collective Stockholm syndrome, she writes, has lead us to believe that surveillance, a surplus of digital information, is a love language. This way of thinking is a disordered belief conditioned by tech corporations who market their infringements on our privacy as ways to under stand more about ourselves, our relationships, and the world at large. Hitzig writes:
Surveillance-as-intimacy renders the self as a “repository of information to be got at rather than a human being whose depths are unknown and respected as such… To be constantly worried about disclosure is to be always in the process of codifying experience as information. Some of the most tantalizing and powerful encounters in our lives resist the kind of classification that often weighs us down and anchors us in the shallow end of what’s possible. In all relationships in which we treat each other as repositories of information, we tend toward surveillance — to our mutual detriment.
Have we become as delusional as Mr. Palomar? Believeing that our digital data traces can give us depth when in reality, they anchor our capacity for relationality to an inexhaustible surface?
Citing political theorist Lowry Pressly’s The Right to Oblivion, Hitzig goes on to suggest that the memory storing technologies, like BeReal, Snapchat, or even the seemingly innocuous photo app, have created an “‘excess of historicity’ about one’s own life that can lead to a ‘sense of life becoming more fixed, more factual, with less ambiguity and life-giving potentiality.’ It diminishes our belief in ‘that central capacity of human agency to change and become different’ from who we were in the past.”
The things that remain hidden keep us functionally tied to other people and things. A well-lived life demands we draw a boundary: what is essential to know (how to not burn down your kitchen, or operate the car you’re driving, or how to know whether an elected official is a conman) and what can remaining hidden, impart knowledge in it’s concealment (an ambigous movie ending, or a secret ingredient, or a sumptous, static silence between two lovers). If we submit to this “excess of historicity” we unwittingly become Mr. Palomar, explaining and replaying the details of his life, stripping his experience of his capacity to “change and become different.”
If the sum total of our attention is everything, then the sum total of our attention is nothing. By mistaking surplus information for knowledge – attending to all stimuli in our enviroment – then we lose our most vital human ability – ascribing meaning to our lives through agentive narrativizing. Calvino shows us this in his ending, when Mr. Palomar dies from his effort to describe every instant of his life. If we lose our human capacity to selectively attend, well, then, we may as well be as good as dead.