How We Disappear: Thomas Mullaney’s All-Too-Personal History of Information
“The second law of thermodynamics is not to be negotiated with.” — Thomas S. Mullaney
The second law of thermodynamics is non-negotiable. The universe will end. Every human being dies. Everything decays and every record disintegrates. So why record history? Why bother remembering? These are the questions that the Stanford historian Thomas S. Mullaney addresses in his intriguing new book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information.
How We Disappear is triggered by grief. Mullaney’s father — a man he never fully understood, an exile in an estranged household — died unexpectedly in 2017. Sitting in his father’s office surrounded by the “paperwork of death,” Mullaney’s training as a historian crystallised into an all-too-personal project of disappearance. It’s a book about what Mullaney calls “intransitive disappearance” — not the spectacular, cataclysmic kind of traditional historiography (wars, book burnings, genocide) but the everyday, uneventful ways things fall apart. Like Thomas Mullaney’s dad. Existence as obsolescence, erosion, sinescence and the slow drift of the unremarkable into nothing.
History, in Mullaney’s account, is a Sisyphean fight against this nothingness. We tell stories to survive and maintain the polite appearance of coherence. If you actually tried to reconstruct experience — the thing-in-itself — you would need an infinite library of trillion-page books. Existence, for Mullaney, is a swirl of stimuli and daydream. History tries to domesticate this Borgesian swirl. So does consciousness itself. That’s why, as Mullaney memorably puts it, “historians do the dirty work of necromancers.” Which is to say they try to negotiate with the second law of thermodynamics.
Five Takeaways
• Intransitive Disappearance: The Everyday Way Things Fall Apart: Mullaney’s central concept: intransitive disappearance. Not the spectacular, cataclysmic kind — book burnings, genocide, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria — but the everyday, drifty, uneventful ways things disintegrate. Obsolescence. Erosion. Sinescence. The unremarkable drift of the unremarkable into nothing. He became obsessed with these forms of disappearance — a pack rat across every discipline he could think of — for twenty-five years. His father’s unexpected death in 2017, sitting in his father’s office amid the paperwork of death, crystallised what had been inchoate into a book.
• History as Domesticated Experience: The Trillion-Page Book: If you tried to actually reconstruct experience — the actual thing, unfiltered — you would need a trillion-page book that would make Naked Lunch look like a kindergarten primer. You’d have to say how many hairs were on his head; whether he favoured his left foot over his right; the scent of his aftershave. Experience, unfiltered, is an n-dimensional vortex of stimuli and daydream. Anytime you read a work of history, you are reading experience that has been domesticated into narrative — with turning points, main characters, thematic arguments. Historians know this. Every practising historian knows that the ideal of reconstructing human experience can never be reached.
• The Vocal Defence of History: Why Do It If You Know It’s Impossible? Mullaney’s answer to the subversive question: history is just the professional counterpart of what every human being does every second of their existence. You, right now, telling yourself the story of your experience, are already well into postproduction. Your experience of being a person in a chair talking to another person on a couch — that is already domesticated. Human beings need to tell stories to live, to maintain continuity, to maintai
