Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 219

Razor's Edge ), J. D. Salinger ( Franny and Zooey ), and Leonard Cohen
(in his song “The Window”).
The vision of knowing through unknowing appears in contemporary
work that does not mention the topic at all. Consider a 2012 essay by
the well-known novelist Zadie Smith, in which she compares her broad
knowledge of the written word with what is for her a sad lack of musical
knowledge (2012). How, she wonders, did she go from an early experi-
ence of hating the work of folksinger Joni Mitchell only to come to love
it many years later? Smith is bafled because she ultimately came to treat
the folksinger's music as a sublime, rapturous experience, saying “it undid
me completely,” a feeling that she has not experienced in the work of her
chosen profession. She concludes that it may have resulted from an experi-
ence of unknowing: “a certain kind of ignorance was the condition.” Into
this pure ignorance, this “non-knowledge,” something sublime, perhaps
an event, beyond or beneath the threshold of awareness, made the shift
in her sensibility possible. She knows and loves Mitchell's work with an
unexpected depth because she did not know it, or much of anything
about music, before. Unlike her knowledge of iction, which has accrued
from years of incremental additions to her own cloud of consciousness,
Smith's knowledge of music followed an epistemological break made
possible not by small, consistent additions to a database, but by years of
willful unknowing. 9
It is unlikely that the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing will join the
ranks of those who, like Teilhard, are hailed for predicting the Internet
and now the cloud, well before their time. But perhaps he should, if
only because the medieval teacher offered a genuine alternative to what
would become a dominant way of knowing in the West that threatens to
overwhelm challenges to the cloud, big data, and the digital positivism
they promote.
An Atlas of Clouds
Aristophanes's play demonstrates that at one of the earliest points in
Western literature, there was already serious concern about the arrogance
that comes from excessive conidence in the ability to know the world
through a narrow positivism and the ease with which we can make a fetish