can hyperawareness of object networks drive a person insane?
The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people -- the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer -- who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.
For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn't see it anymore.
I sank down on the bench, stupefied, stunned by this profusion of beings without origin: everywhere blossomings, hatchings out, my ears buzzed with existence, my very flesh throbbed and opened, abandoned itself to the universal burgeoning. It was repugnant.
Funes remembered not only every leaf on every tree of every wood, but every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He determined to reduce all of his experience to some seventy thousand recollections. . . . He knew that at the hour of his death he would have scarcely finished classifying all the memories of his childhood.
Borges, quoted by Geoffrey Bowker, in "Memory Practices in the Sciences" (.pdf)
