Opinion: The Epstein Data and Facts, Files, Frictions

The victims in the Epstein Files are brutally rendered into a new form of trafficking and circulation—as documents

By Pramod K Nayar

The sheer volume of information, even when redacted and denied, being sent in the form of The Epstein Files merits examination for the culture of data in which we are trapped in an endless circuit of facts, files and filibusters.

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We can unpack several complicated layers to the question of data in the Files.

Making Data

Data, even or especially Big Data (and this is the age of Big Data), is assumed to be transparent, just as information is self-evident and the foundation of truth. We assume, as data culture studies by Lisa Gitelman and theorists of knowledge such as Geoffrey Bowker and others caution us, data’s neutrality and objectivity.

But we never pause and ask how is data imagined because, for all practical purposes, data precedes imagination, collection and interpretation. But, as Gitelman and Virginia Jackson tell us, ‘Data need to be imagined as data to exist and function as such, and the imagination of data entails an interpretive base’. In other words, what counts as data, merits our attention as data, is a first step in classifying (only) some things as data. Gitelman and Jackson point out:

The subject of data is bound to alienate students and scholars in disciplines within the humanities particularly. Few literary critics want to think of the poems or novels they read as “data,” and for good reason.

Data at once hides and reveals ‘things’ and processes. In this current case, social relations, people’s peccadilloes, cruel acts, victimisation, and cover-ups, among others.

When we assume that the emails, text messages and travel records in The Epstein Files count as data that points to the horrific character of billionaires, we have bestowed a certain value on these bits and pieces of information in the Files. That is, we link travel records (flight plans, holiday plans, invitations, requests for an invitation) to our consensually (although not always in a majority) arrived at concepts of moral values. These bits of ‘data’ then become objective sources of information which they really are not. Or, this data stands as a given, and used to construct a model of human behaviour (presidents, CEOs, ex-royalty, businessmen, bureaucrats) and come to certain conclusions about it. If we had different data, of course, we would have a different set of conclusions.

Data Friction, Data Infra

The historian Paul Edwards coined the term ‘data friction’ to speak of the questions that affirm what should count as data, which data are good and which less reliable, or how big data sets we need to come to certain conclusions.

All data in the Files are subject to this data friction, not the least by the government and agencies like the FBI, the media, but also by the high-visibility people like Chomsky, whose names figure in the data. ‘I was misled’, ‘I had no idea’, ‘that was not the reason why I visited Epstein’s home’, and other rhetorical strategies of deniability are now commonplace.

The critic Ellen Gruber Garvey reading the volume, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839, notes how the volume combined personal testimony from those who lived in the South, some of them former slaveholders, with advertisements for runaway slaves in local newspapers. Garvey argues that such a merger of very different forms of ‘data’ used the slaveholders’ own words in the advertisements and gave abolitionist discourse a very different spin.

The data counts as evidence now in the same way ads in American newspapers exposed the brutality of slavery system. The data is made to speak

The volume shifted focus from treating these ads as mere anecdotes to one that reinterpreted them as the containers of data about the brutality of slavery. The marks and scars that slaveholders described as a means of identifying individual runaways were then transformed by collection and analysis in the volume as indictments of slavery. The ads were abstracted and aggregated for this purpose.

What is being built up, consciously or otherwise, is a data infrastructure of public and private morality. Data works as aggregates: bits and pieces come together, or are brought together, and that is how they accrue power. The emails, text messages, travel records, photographs, even doodles, are split, conjoined, classified, organised into ‘data’ (data is notoriously both singular and plural), although the actual principles of organisation can be hard to unravel.

The entire rhetorical weight of the Files is built on this aggregation into data infrastructures which, we are told, points to Epstein’s perversions but also his tremendous social capital. The data counts as evidence now in the same way the ads in the newspapers of America counted as evidence for the brutality slavery system. The data is made to speak.

Epistemic Objects

Documents such as the files are epistemic objects, as Lisa Gitelman calls them. They are ‘the recognizable sites and subjects of interpretation across the disciplines and beyond, evidential structures in the long human history of clues’. And she adds

documents are documents merely by dint of their potential to show: they are flagged and filed away for the future, just in case. Both know show and no show depend on an implied self-evidence that is intrinsically rhetorical.

More importantly, in the case of the Files, ‘Any object can be a thing, but once it is framed as or entered into evidence — once it is mobilised — it becomes a document, an instance proper to that genre’.

The redaction of the papers (emails, messages) in the Files points to classificatory systems, surveillance and the mobilisation of individual texts. These are meant as much to show and are constituted as documents of a self-evident nature, but they are not: they are mobilised into and within the context of public morality, misuse of power, social capital, and capital itself in terms of high finance — that is how they become evidence in our purported knowledge of the lives of the rich and famous.

The excess of information about perps on one side in these ‘self-evident’ documents is accompanied by the horrific naming of the minor victims of Epstein’s monstrous cohort. In sharp contrast to in camera proceedings, the salaciousness of media coverage of the documents shows the victimhood of the victims, first as objects of the cultic monstrous of the Epstein circle, and then as objects served up as evidence in the documents of the horror. The victims are the made-visible material objects that provide the meaning of the Files as documents in what is an unforgivable media circus of spotlighting the hardest hit.

The audience has been Epsteined. His victims are brutally rendered into a new form of trafficking and circulation. As documents.

 

(The author is Senior Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)