People say that nobody knows what a book is any more. It is observed that people sit on trains, or buses and in waiting rooms and where a few years ago they would have been reading a book, they will instead be consoled at their phone doing some data processing. This might be the case, but perhaps no one has ever really known what a book is, because the book has always been changing. Today the book is again bursting its bounds, becoming a point of mediation, swallowing other media systems and forms of knowledge while fragmenting and migrating into new forms.
One of the conditions of the book in the present day is that, as a medium of information storage, it has just gotten too big to cope with itself. Amplifying this phenomenon, artists such as Aleksandra Domanović and Übermorgen have in recent years been showing large stacks of sheets of office paper. In Übermorgen’s case the stacks consist of printed out documentation of legal papers generated in the course of their projects, such as Vote-Auction, 700 Kgs of Temporary Injunctions (2005). Domanović, for her part, has displayed a series of works ranging from stacks of wrapped reams of paper to stacks of ink-jet printed pages with images that bleed over the edges, aligned to create a whole image in works such as Untitled (Happy Office) and Untitled (Why Can’t Women Time Travel), both from 2013.
These aren’t books per se, but they illustrate the kinds of convulsions that in part map this condition: paper is overflowing. In their 2010 exhibition Book-Machine, The Office of Metropolitan Architecture produced a one-off book, whose spine measured several metres in length, with printed documentation from all of their projects. It was 40,000 pages long.
The poet of quantity Kenneth Goldsmith has recently held a work called Printing Out the Internet (2013) as a meditation on the nature of digital abundance. One further iteration of this project at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2014) consisted of 250,000 pages of pirated JSTOR documents (a massive cache of papers from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society made available via Pirate Bay) printed in tribute to suicided information activist Aaron Swartz. What distinguishes such work from masses of paper in earlier art? In the 1970s Reiner Ruthenbeck used to make Papierhaufen, heaps of monotone crumpled paper.
More neatly, artists such as Guy de Cointet (as part of the 1971 project ACRCIT ) and later Félix González-Torres (in early 1990s works such as Untitled (Aparición) and Untitled (Blue Mirror)) placed stacks of newspapers or posters in galleries for visitors to take. One of the distinctions then is that today’s paper works are often printed out on a desktop printer. It’s not a one-off necessarily, nor a numbered multiple, just a print-out, something a bit more incidental to objecthood and enumeration. The state of digital abundance has its specific effects in relation to the media of music, film, and photography where conditions of super-accumulation are reflected also in numerous forms of circulation that exceed, disorder and amplify their capacities as media. As digital abundance conjugates with printing and with paper it generates other effects: hoarding, ephemerality, deforestation, but also an explosion of text, especially notable in what was only a few decades ago thought to be heading towards a post-literate condition. But equally, we see something of a reciprocal explosion of books, and a proliferation and mutation of their kind.
One consequence of the massive amplification of symbol processing made possible by electronic computing, exemplified in its early ability to crack codes, and a quality that became a regular marvel in the era in which computers were thought of as “electronic brains”, is that the book exceeds its bindings. At the same time, as this amplification occurs, habits and media behaviours that have been inculcated and intensified by books as media, migrate into other forms and systems. Whilst certain strands of the “Digital Humanities” have simply seen fit to work on the “digitization” of books, making scans and text corpuses available with tools for their analysis, as if the book is essentially unchanging and originally separate from digits, others such as Andrew Piper, Lori Emerson, Amy Spencer and Hanna Kuusela are busy tracing the way in which as they come into combination, both computers and books change. The deep imbrication between books and computational forms is in turn part of a wider set of fields of co-evolution that come to bear force upon and work their way into the book.
Guttorm Guttormsgaard’s archive is full of books that are entangled with other processes of object formation. Some are magnificent comings together of different orders of objects—like the Ethiopian Coptic Bible with its rucksack. In the present day, other currents and kinds of movement intercept and remobilize the book’s constituent forms. As we see books entangling with computational structures and entities we can perhaps see them undergoing a further transition: incunabula, codex, book, stack, queue, heap. We can go on—lists, tables, interfaces, windows, fields—the shape and modus operandi of the book is mobilised as a conceptual scaffold into manifold combinations. The book is an essentially shifting, capacious form – there is not one aspect of its characteristics concerning binding, titling, authorship, typesetting, pagination, orthography, and so on, that has not been exceeded, gone beyond or done without in various and numerous cases. Books are also interspersed with other operations that exceed their bounds, scanning, analyzing, forming into corpuses, but they still hang together. We can say then that the book is a diagram: a schematization of parts, a way of doing things and of thinking and experiencing that manifests differently in relation to different historical, material, aesthetic and economic dynamics. This loose swarm of characteristics, each of which has their own genealogy, is massively internally differentiated, and generative. Some of these characteristics recede or come to the fore at different moments, coming into combination with others and mutating their characteristics as they do so. Others will stay remarkably resilient across times and across the different manifestations of the book.
The religious, avant-garde and popular books amongst others gathered by Guttormsgaard are beautiful examples of the way in which books combine with specific forces of material and cultural inventiveness to achieve beautifully inventive reorganisations of the book, and in turn how the book as diagram grapples with and shapes what it gives rise to: memory, thought, orthodoxy, belief, insight, compulsion, arousal, imagination, authority. Baskerville’s folio version of the Bible of 1763—included in the collection—inaugurated an era of clarity of typesetting and typeface design, but it also brought other kinds of data into the book, such as the proposed dates of specific events logged as notes in the margins. Moreover, it opened up the machinic quality of the book as a space of expressive form – the beautifully exaggerated kerning of the titles of each book for instance. Consider too, books made for children who can’t yet read: picture books; plastic-paged books to look at and flap about with in the bath; books of thick cardboard that are good for gnawing on with sore teething gums; ugly books with plastic chains that can be attached to buggies and fiddled with until they rot; books that come with small piezo-speakers to make pleasingly unpleasant noises; or those with toy figures or puzzles in. Here, the book, as an image of a book, a substitute for books to come, contains and moves into the world, starts forming habits, couples with the need to relieve physical pain or boredom, becomes something to be attached to. Is this a recent phenomenon? The archive formed at Blaker by Guttormsgaard will inevitably have the answer to that somewhere.
Books interfere with stories and with information as they give rise to them, shape and pummel the words, images and structures that also engender the book. In certain societies, those corners that are not marked heavily by the production of books, an index of how much power one has in the world, is how much paper you have in your dwelling. Identity papers are a basic form of document, a means of relaying obligation, evading or insisting on certain kinds of compulsion in relation to codes, titles, systems, personhood. Books too take on related roles, of being an authority to turn to, even if only in the form of a consolation.
Academic books act as a condenser of referrals to other authorities via citations, bibliographic links, vague gestures towards or precise analysis of other books, other knots of interlinked argument. David Markson’s novels, thick with citation and memory, act as patchbays linking different streams of text, ideas and experience across time, turning the book as diagram into a meta-medium, one with its own idiosyncrasies and deficiencies yielding expressive texture. William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Ronald Sukenick, Lawrence Sterne, Bill Atkinson, Isabel Waidner, John Latham, Tim Berners Lee, Ted Nelson, Karl Krauss, Oulipo, William Caxton and myriad others all do something slightly unspeakably physical with the book, forcing and enticing the diagram to rework and rebind itself in composition with other forces. Poems are written out of the concatenation of such indexes of persons as that just mentioned, poets and engineers filching and filtering the recursions of the diagram. But these are big names, proper ones, we might also recall the achieved impossibility of the invention of the different marks of punctuation by anonymous operators that give birth to other operators, readers, writers and further books. Oddly, as Joseph Mazur points out, the culture of mathematics, with its different modality of reflexivity, allows for a rather more certain recall of the introduction of specific symbols.4 Each symbol in turn becomes a point of inflection for language to crystallise around and rework clusters and tangles of relations.
This state of being a point of condensation makes some books into a treasure trove, a chamber inside a mountain of words and pages that can only be entered by a slender, pressurising aperture; other books act as open forms of gathering and assembling, of objects, of people, movements; still others trigger the gratification and curse of compulsive reading, a line out of everyday life that need only be a line here and there. Books are interwoven with computational forms, register, memory, network, code, variable, symbolic systems transposed to other symbolic systems, tangling with language, metals, electricity, imaginary, and unfolding too in systems of record and domination through which modes of evasion, suggestion and flagrancy sift, filter and form their own crucibles of language, technology and instruction. The book too is sometimes a barricade, something lodged in the midst of matter to constitute a specific locus that may submerge for years, intensified thickenings of substances as varied as can be brought together by structured strings of symbols. Each entity in such a collection acts as a potent residue for forms of life yet to come. Perhaps we will find out what a book is when it is over, when they become mysterious artefacts from another age. Until then people are in the midst of books and as such, since we also have a certain difficulty in knowing what we are any more, books might tell us something about ourselves.
❦It is commonplace to refer to “the magic of books” or “the magic of reading.” If you search online for either of those phrases, you find millions of results. But what if printed books, back when they first appeared, really were magical? And what if reading, too, was seen as a magical activity? What could those phrases have meant then, and how could this magic have shaped the revolution wrought by the invention of printing?
When printing was introduced into Western Europe in the 1440s, it did in fact emerge from the world of natural magic. Its inventor, Johannes Gutenberg, is a mysterious figure, but we know that he was brought up in the thriving mercantile towns of western Germany, that he came from an old military family down on its luck, and that he was probably trained as a goldsmith. That gave him exactly the combination of ambition, desperation, and skill characteristic of a class of wanderers prominent at the time. These wanderers sought to make fortunes out of their mastery of nature’s powers, often by making and selling marvelous machines embodying such powers. Gutenberg’s own initial project was of exactly this kind. He proposed to make tens of thousands of brooches for pilgrims headed for a religious festival at the old Carolingian capital of Aachen. The polished metal surface of each brooch, he claimed, would capture the virtues that were emitted like light rays from a quartet of holy relics stored in the cathedral and revealed to the faithful only once every seven years. In other words, these devices—which were probably made using some kind of stamping technique—were machines to capture, store, transport, and reissue influence. When he realized that he had mistaken the date of the pilgrimage and consequently faced ruin, Gutenberg offered his disgruntled partners instead a new “art and adventure,” but still one based on a secret stamping machine. This was his printing press—as it turned out, a massively more consequential influence-recording machine.
The relative importance of printing is obvious in retrospect. But such experimental efforts were typical of what was a period of artisanal ambition. Many at the time were experimenting with impressing machines: coiners produced currency and medals, binders used presses to stamp designs on the panels encasing books, and carvers created woodblocks to make repeated copies of playing-cards and block-books like the Ars Moriendi. When asked, these artisans would describe their efforts in terms of a special knowledge of nature’s powers; natural magic was in effect the extension of artisanal expertise into the domain of science. And their objects were typically amalgams of different tools and techniques. Block-books, for example, incorporated manuscript writing and illumination as well as the images replicated from wood. The first “true” printed books were likewise amalgams. We repeatedly see in them printed characters combined with handwriting, rubrication, and even illumination. They should be recognized as the profoundly strange objects they were.
But if printing was natural magic, so too was reading. In the mid-sixteenth century, as the printed book became the defining medium of its age, it spread the news of a device that rapidly became the standard model for accounts of what happened whenever a reader encountered a page. This device, the camera obscura, was another distinctive product of the skilled magic of the time. The most commonly cited account of the machine was the 23-year-old prodigy Giambattista della Porta’s phenomenally successful Magia Naturalis—a book that appeared in many editions and translations across Europe in the 150 years after its first publication in Naples in 1558, and that virtually defined the enterprise of natural magic in the late Renaissance. The camera obscura occupied a pivotal place in the work, marking as it did the book’s foray into “Mathematical Sciences.” It was the foremost of a series of light-manipulating “Geometrical instruments” that were, della Porta implied, ideal for introducing such sciences because “the truth of Mathematical Demonstrations should be made good by Ocular experiments.” Right at the outset, then, the camera obscura was held up as the model for rational, geometrical accounting.
What della Porta described was not the small, shoebox-sized contraption that one often thinks of today. It was a darkened room with a hole in one wall, fitted with a lens. (Della Porta seems to have regarded the lens as his own improvement to a device that was already fairly familiar.) The natural magician sat inside this “chamber” (hence camera) and viewed images cast from the lens onto a screen or the far wall. So far, so Camera obscura and the tricks of nature (rotate the image and a face appears in the landscape). From Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis (1646). 8 geometrical—although a proper account of it in such terms would be published only decades later, by Johannes Kepler. Indeed, it was lawlike enough to be used as an aid for painters, who could trace the projected image to help them portray reality. We know that Kepler, for one, used such a machine. And della Porta inaugurated what became the dominant European tradition for explaining human vision, when he remarked that the camera obscura was a model of the eye itself. This model resolved once and for all the old conflict between intromission and extramission theories, he noted, in favour of the former. “The image is let in by the pupil, as by the hole of a window,” della Porta declared, and was projected onto “that part of the Sphere, that is set in the middle of the eye.” There the imagination could apprehend it, forming the foundation of knowledge itself.
And yet… it was clear from the outset that the camera obscura also highlighted the fragility and capriciousness of such perception. This was for two reasons. First, human perceptions within the camera were not, in fact, determined solely by the rules of geometry, but depended on acclimatization. Della Porta noted that a viewer would not at first perceive any image at all inside the chamber because of what we would call afterimages, which were thought to display the anti-empirical power of the imagination. “You must stay a while,” he warned, because the “affection” in the eye made by light in the outside environment prior to entry would produce a stubbornly lasting effect. Kepler and others concurred, suggesting that it would take at least a quarter of an hour “until the images impressed by the spirits in the clear light of day might vanish.” And, second, the associations created by the natural-magical origin of the device persisted. In context, the images one did see in a camera were tricks and illusions. Again, imagination played a part here. Della Porta explained how to deceive viewers by casting images of children and animals (including lions, rhinoceroses, and the like) so convincingly that viewers “cannot tell whether they be true or delusions.” Kepler, less exotically, emphasized that seeing a truthful image depended on making quite careful arrangements. If the screen were too far from the hole, for example, then the extra detail wrought by magnification would be lost by dilution and illumination of the intervening air and dust. And a small hole would produce a clearer but weaker image. It would be hard to discern—“just as very small writing is hard to read by a weak sense of vision.”
A paradox consequently lay at the heart of the printing revolution. Vision in general, and reading in particular, should be explicable in terms of the archetypal magical machine, the camera obscura. This lent it a geometrical, Euclidean logic, modeled on the most demonstrative of all forms of reason. It implied that a true reading would 9 be determined by the page itself, and would be common to all who encountered it. Readings were therefore caused, and could be predicted. Much ecclesiastical and state policy with regard to the press was based on this simple assumption. But the camera was a producer of illusions: careful management was required to ensure that its users received true illusions. So its use as a model for reading also implied that in practice readings would be many and varied. They would depend on context, on skill, on training, and on the power of the imagination. The implication was that reading in the end could not be Euclidean. Instead one had to think in terms of congeries of learned behaviours and constraints. And in fact one of the most impressive things about the printing revolution in early modern Europe is the proliferation of reading practices that accompanied—more, that defined—it. It was not only that more readers encountered more books than before. They encountered more kinds of books, and dealt with them in more kinds of ways. Suddenly, to be a successful citizen one had to work with bibles, indulgences, proclamations, newsbooks, almanacs, printed sermons, catechisms, pamphlets, medical recipe books, cookbooks—an extraordinary diversity. More importantly, the range of practices denoted by the term reading proliferated too. They extended from the scholarly poring over Aristotle at universities to the consultation of numerical tables for navigating the oceans. The remarkable thing was that printing facilitated this proliferation of both object and practice.
When we hail the revolutionary effects fomented by the invention of printing, this diversity of objects and practices is what we have in mind. And we duly lament the efforts of church and state to restrict them by various forms of policing and censorship. But the failure of those efforts is, by and large, their common feature. On the other hand, measures to uphold the power of reading were taken too, often in tandem with restrictions. An outstanding example is a law passed in Venice in the mid-sixteenth century ruling that if one printed a book with margins too small to allow annotation, or on paper too poor to take handwritten notes, then the entire impression would be seized and the privilege (roughly speaking, the copyright) lost forever. That severe repercussion signaled the importance placed by the Venetian Republic on the diversity of reading.
And this gives rise to another paradox, this time centering on the media revolution that has taken place in our own age. Think back to the 1980s and 1990s. With digitization, books and reading seemed set to enjoy another age of proliferating objects and uses. E-books could be circulated at minimal cost, and could incorporate elements impossible to capture on the printed page: moving images, updated information, responses to critics. Reading could proliferate too. And so could its traces—the marks made by readers in the course of their engagement with the work, and which, in printed books from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries, form the raw materials from which historical accounts of reading itself can be built. In some ways this has indeed happened. But in practice it is all too often impeded. If you “buy” an e-book, what you may get is not a document at all, but an access protocol for a distantly held file. Programs like Adobe’s that are widely used in today’s digital publishing sector use these protocols as forms of DRM (Digital Rights Management), in principle to prevent piracy. But their restrictive effects are wider than that implies. For example, e-books may not be printable. And DRM may prevent readers from recording annotations at all.
So what in sixteenth-century Venice would have cost the publisher his copyright is 10 now imposed in the name of defending that same copyright. Then, diversity of reading prevailed over property; now, property prevails over diversity of reading. In effect, reading is reduced to only a kind of camera-obscura scanning process—minus the original magic. Perhaps there is a fantasy involved here too, in the very assumption that magic could be removed so completely from the act of reading. This “disenchantment of the page” may be as much an illusion as anything in della Porta. At any rate, the paradoxical result is that a medium that could facilitate a new proliferation in reading practices is being constrained to a drastic contraction of such practices.
We need to notice this. It is by no means a necessary result of digitization, and it can be countered. In order to bring the problem into focus, however, it helps to recall the lost magic of printed books and their readings. It is thanks to diverse, eclectic collections like Guttorm Guttormsgaard’s—collections that preserve not only books themselves, but the traces of their making and use—that this is possible today.
❦Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress. (via futureofthebook.org)
❦Writing a program and then running it is magic, in a way. The numbers, letters and symbols of code are transmuted into instructions executed by microscopic circuits to achieve the desired results. But just because the results seem magical does not mean that coding is mysterious and inaccessible. Indeed, one of the joys of coding is that computers are the opposite of mysterious: they operate in an unforgivingly predictable, consistent and deterministic manner. (via economist.com)
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The future of the book and the future of reading are possibly the exact same thing. Francesco Casetti defines a medium as a site of experience. Perhaps instead of thinking of a medium purely in material qualities, consider the experiental qualities and whether the phenomenological qualities of that experience can survive a change in materials.– Eric Hu