Book Presence in a Digital Age 9781501321184, 9781501321214, 9781501321207

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Book Presence in a Digital Age

Book Presence in a Digital Age Edited by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Kári Driscoll, and Jessica Pressman

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Kári Driscoll, Jessica Pressman, and Contributors, 2018 Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover image © Brian Dettmer All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene, editor. | Driscoll, Kári, editor. | Pressman, Jessica, editor. Title: Book presence in a digital age / edited by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Kári Driscoll, and Jessica Pressman. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017055546 (print) | LCCN 2018037475 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501321207 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501321191 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781501321184 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Books--History. | Books and reading--History. | Literature and technology. Classification: LCC Z116.A2 (ebook) | LCC Z116.A2 B66 2018 (print) | DDC 002.09--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055546 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2118-4 PB: 978-1-5013-6097-8 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2120-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-2119-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Plates List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors 1

Book Presence: An Introductory Exploration Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

Part 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

8 9

viii x 1

Theory and Overview

Pagina Abscondita: Reading in the Book’s Wake John T. Hamilton From Codex to Codecs Garrett Stewart Bookwork and Bookishness: An interview with Doug Beube and Brian Dettmer Jessica Pressman

Part 2

vii

27 44 60

Media Changes and Materiality

Infrathin Platforms: Print on Demand as Auto-Factography Hannes Bajohr Genre and Materiality: Autobiography and Zines Anna Poletti Doing Things with Literature in a Digital Age: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and the Material Turn in Literary Studies Liedeke Plate “Book for Loan”: S. as Paradox of Media Change Emma de Vries and Yra van Dijk Book Presence and Feline Absence: A Conversation with Mark Z. Danielewski Kári Driscoll and Inge van de Ven

71 90

109 127 145

Part 3 Conceptual Possibilities of the Book 10 Learn to Read Differently Simon Morris 11 Emoji Dick and the Eponymous Whale Lisa Gitelman 12 The Demediation of Writing in Memory Palace and Fugitive Sparrows Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

163 195 211

vi

Contents

13 Revisiting the Book-as-World: World-Making and Book Materiality in Only Revolutions and The Atlas Inge van de Ven 14 Books as Archives: An Interview with Ernst van Alphen Kiene Brillenburg Wurth Index

225 247 255

List of Plates Plate 1

Plate 2

Plate 3

Plate 4

Plate 5

Plate 6

Plate 7

Brian Dettmer, Tower 58 (Britannica), 2012. Hardcover books, acrylic varnish. 89½" × 15" × 15". Courtesy the artist and P•P•O•W, New York. Brian Dettmer, Lost Worlds, 2016. Hardcover book, acrylic varnish. 8¼" × 6⅛" × 1¼". Courtesy of the artist and P•P•O•W, New York. Brian Dettmer, New Funk Standards, 2017. Hardcover book, acrylic varnish. 12¾" × 12" × 5¾". Courtesy of the artist and P•P•O•W, New York. Brian Dettmer, Tower of Babble, 2011. Paperback books, acrylic varnish. 28" × 10½" × 10½". Courtesy of the artist and P•P•O•W, New York. Doug Beube, Border Crossing: In the War Room, 2006. Altered atlas, thread, zippers, piping, meal, wire. 19" × 22" × 5". Courtesy of the artist. Doug Beube, Disconnecting the Reality of Old Glory, 2012. Altered books, collage, sculpture, acrylic, ink, thread, paper, zippers. 12½" × 30" × 2". Courtesy of the artist. Doug Beube, Fallen Borders, 2015. Atlas, collage. 12½" × 11¾" × 11½". Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 8

Doug Beube, Cut Shortcomings, 2015. Hardcover book. 9½" × 7¾" × ⅝". Courtesy of the artist.

List of Illustrations Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 Figure 10.1 Figure 10.2

Figure 10.3

Figure 10.4 Figure 10.5 Figure 10.6

Figure 10.7

Figure 10.8

Jason Huff and Mimi Cabell, American Psycho (Traumawien, 2012), 3 Jean Keller, The Black Book (Lulu Press/self-published, 2013) Detail from new beginnings zine, Bianca Martin (2015) An issue of YOU, Luke You, undated Contents of book-box S. Reprinted with permission of Mulholland Books Schematic rendering of our understanding of S. as an expanding, aggregative transmedia constellation Simon Morris, The Royal Road to the Unconscious (York: Information as Material, 2003) Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated and edited by James Strachey, assisted by Alan Tyson, revised by Angela Richards (Harmonsdworth: Penguin, 1985) Patrick Blackwell, Ed Ruscha, and Mason Williams, Royal Road Test, fourth edition (Los Angeles, 1980). Signed copy of the book gifted to me by Ed Ruscha The Devil’s Playground, double-page spread from Royal Road Test Seventy-eight students from York College cutting up Professor Freud’s text, 2003. Photographs by Simon Morris Redbridge road, Crossways, Dorset, approximately 122 miles southwest of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical couch, double page spread from The Royal Road to the Unconscious 1963 Buick Le Sabre and 2002 Renault Clio, double page spread from Royal Road Test and The Royal Road to the Unconscious, respectively Throwing Sigmund Freud’s words out of a car window from The Royal Road to the Unconscious

81 83 97 101 128 133 164

165

167 168 169

170

171 172

List of Illustrations

Figure 10.9 Figure 10.10 Figure 10.11 Figure 10.12 Figure 10.13

Figure 10.14 Figure 10.15 Figure 10.16 Figure 10.17

Figure 10.18 Figure 10.19 Figure 10.20 Figure 10.21 Figure 11.1

223,464 words traveling at 90 mph, from The Royal Road to the Unconscious The surrealness of snow that has fallen at the wrong time of the year, from The Royal Road to the Unconscious Fever & Night-terrors, from The Royal Road to the Unconscious Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud (York: Information as Material, 2005) Simon Morris (artist) and Christine Farion (creative technologist), Interactive touch screen kiosk reprocessing Freud’s text for the exhibition, An Art of Readers, curated by Yann Serandour, Galerie Art & Essai, Université Rennes 2, France, 2005 Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, adjacent to Simon Morris’s Re-Writing Freud Double-page spread from Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud Simon Morris, Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (York: Information as Material, 2010) Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, 1957, Simon Morris’ Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head, 2010 and Joe Hale’s Getting Inside Simon Morris’ Head, 2014 Simon Morris, Pigeon Reader (York: Information as Material, 2012) Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1997 and Simon Morris’s Pigeon Reader, 2012 Double page spread from Simon Morris’s Pigeon Reader, pp. 176–77 Double page spread from Simon Morris’s Pigeon Reader, pp. 180–81 Excerpt from Emoji Dick by Herman Melville, edited and compiled by Fred Benenson, translated by Amazon Mechanical Turk (Lulu Press, 2010), p. 180

ix

173 174 174 175

176 177 179 180

185 187 190 190 191

205

Notes on Contributors Kiene Brillenburg Wurth is Full Professor of Literature and Comparative Media at the University of Utrecht. She is the author of Musically Sublime (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009) and editor of Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace (Fordham/Oxford University Press, 2012). She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and volumes on literature and new media, intermediality, music, and music philosophy. Kári Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He holds a PhD in German Language and Literature from Columbia University. He is the co-editor, with Susanne C. Knittel, of Memory after Humanism, a special issue of Parallax, 22, no. 4 (2017), and, with Eva Hoffmann, of What Is Zoopoetics? – Texts, Bodies, Entanglement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He is also an award-winning translator. Jessica Pressman is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, where she also directs SDSU’s Digital Humanities Initiative (dh.sdsu.edu). She is the author of Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford University Press, 2014), co-author, with Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass, of Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (University of Iowa Press, 2015), and co-editor, with N. Katherine Hayles, of  Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in a Postprint Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). She is a recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Hannes Bajohr received his PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Columbia University with a dissertation on Hans Blumenberg’s theory of language. Currently, he is a research fellow at Berlin’s Center for Literary and Cultural Research, working on a history of negative anthropology. He is co-editor of the Hans Blumenberg Reader (forthcoming with Cornell University Press) and author of Judith N. Shklar (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2015).

Notes on Contributors

xi

Doug Beube is an artist whose work explores the materiality of the book itself, through altered bookwork, collage, mixed media, and sculpture. By applying quasi-software functions such as cutting, pasting, and hidden text onto an analogue system, he pushes the boundaries of linearity and fixity of this seemingly antiquated technology that is still purposeful in the digital age. His book,  Breaking the Codex: Bookwork, Collage and Mixed Media,  was published by the Iconoclastic Museum Press, Brooklyn, New York, in 2011. In 2016 Doug was a recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant.  Brian Dettmer lives and works in New York. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at numerous institutions including the Hermann Geiger Foundation, Cecina, Italy, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, Virginia. His works have been exhibited internationally in shows at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC; the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois; the High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; and the Perez Art Museum, Miami, Florida, among others. Dettmer’s sculptures can be found in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; the Art Institute of Chicago Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Illinois; the High Museum, Georgia; and the Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut. He has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK and the New York Public Library, New York, and given a TED talk for the TED Youth Conference in 2014. Dettmer’s work has been featured in several publications and programs including the New York Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, Chicago Tribune, Art News, Modern Painters, Wired, the Village Voice, Harper’s, CBS News, and NPR. Brian Dettmer is represented by P•P•O•W Gallery in New York. Yra van Dijk  is Full Professor of Modern Dutch Literature in a Global Perspective at the University of Leiden.  She is the author of  Leegte, leegte die ademt: Het typografisch wit in de moderne poëzie  (2006), on blanks and silences in modern poetry.  She is the co-editor, with Thomas Vaessens, of Reconsidering the Postmodern:  European Literature Beyond Relativism (2011) and, with Maarten de Pourcq and Carl de Strycker, of Draden in het donker. Intertekstualiteit in theorie en praksis (2013).  Her latest book, Afgrond zonder vangnet. Liefde en geweld in de romans van Arnon Grunberg, will be published in the spring of 2018.

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Notes on Contributors

Lisa Gitelman is Professor of English and of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is the author most recently of Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke UP 2014). Other works include the edited collection “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron (2013) and the monograph Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (2006), both with MIT Press. John T. Hamilton is the William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author, most recently, of Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (Princeton University Press, 2013). Other books include Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language (Columbia University Press, 2008) and Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2004) Simon Morris is Professor of Art and Director of Research at Leeds Beckett University. In 2002 he founded the independent publishing imprint Information as Material which he co-edits with Craig Dworkin, Kaja Marczewska, and Nick Thurston. In 2010 he curated The Perverse Library, the first exhibition of conceptual writing and from 2011 to 2012 he was writer-in-residence at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (with Craig Dworkin & Nick Thurston). He is the author of numerous books, including  bibliomania  (with Helen Sacoor) (1998),  The Royal Road to the Unconscious (2003),  Re-Writing Freud (2005),  Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (2010),  Do or DIY (with Craig Dworkin & Nick Thurston) (2012), Pigeon Reader (2012), and the edited anthology Reading as Art (2016) all with Information as Material. Liedeke Plate is Professor of Culture and Inclusivity at the University of Nijmegen. Her work centers on literature, gender, and cultural memory. She is the author of Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (Palgrave 2011) and co-editor, most recently, of Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture and Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture: A Comprehensive Guide to Gender Studies (both Routledge, 2017). Anna Poletti is Associate Professor of English Language and Culture at Utrecht University. She is the author of  Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young  Lives  in Australian Zine Culture  (2008), and  co-author of  Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation  (with Kate Douglas, 2016).

Notes on Contributors

xiii

With Julie Rak she is co-editor of the essay collection  Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online  (2014). Her next book,  Biomediations: Writing Ourselves Beyond the Book is forthcoming from New York University. Garrett Stewart is James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa. His volume titled Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (Chicago University Press, 2011) investigates the ironies of illegibility in conceptual book sculpture, whether in found, altered, or fabricated codex forms, often in view of the digital epoch’s rapid transformation of the reading experience. He is the author, more recently, of Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance (2015) and  Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art  (2017). He was elected in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Inge van de Ven is Assistant Professor of Online Culture in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg School of Humanities, the Netherlands. She holds a PhD from Utrecht University, where she also completed postdoctoral research on creativity in education (Education for Learning Societies). She has held visiting scholarships at Harvard University (2013) and Shanghai International Studies University (2017). Her articles appeared in journals such as  European Journal of English Studies,  Between,  Image&Narrative, and  Journal for Creative Behavior, and she is currently writing a monograph entitled Big Books in Times of Big Data. Emma de Vries is a PhD researcher at Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society, and a former Fulbright Scholar and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Fellow at UCLA Design Media Arts, and Harvard’s metaLAB. Her forthcoming dissertation, “The Postal Imagination” (2018), investigates how new uses of the mail medium, emerging at the brink of its disappearance as a means of everyday communication, reflect on the cultural implications of technological change, and on the fears and fantasies that these changes carry with them.

1

Book Presence: An Introductory Exploration Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

This is not a collection of papers from a conference. This is a book inspired by an event: Book Presence in a Digital Age (2012). Conferences bring people and scholarship together; this particular conference gathered together not only scholars from comparative literature, digital humanities, gender studies, and media studies, but also writers, artists, and publishers. When people from different backgrounds meet, the professional ground beneath their feet lets loose a little. Artists produce knowledge through things, academics (at least those from the humanities) produce interpretations and concepts—and yet during the conference these turned out to be no less material than things made from concrete matter. Materiality, the presence of materiality, of literary materiality, of literature in and beyond the book, was of key concern to all these people who, for the most part, have become the authors of the chapters of the present book. This introduction is devoted to our use of the concepts of materiality, presence, and book presence, and to the network of scholars and artists contributing to the conference and this book. It aims to convey the main insights and ideas generated within this network as a result of interdisciplinary conversations on books in an age of media change. During the last three decades, materiality and presence have been much debated in research domains such as aesthetics, philosophy, gender studies, sociology, media studies, and comparative literature. To consider the uses and complexities of the concepts of materiality and presence in all these domains is beyond the scope and purpose of this introduction. We do, however, offer a selective overview of critical uses of these concepts that are most relevant to the purposes of this book—book presence in a digital age—and that, we feel, will help to strengthen the emerging field of comparative textual media (Hayles and Pressman 2013) in which we situate it. In the late print age, comparative

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Book Presence in a Digital Age

literature is no longer a discipline of comparative languages alone, but of the different materialities—digital, printed, handwritten, screen- or paper based— that help to format and transform the stories that we tell and the poetries we forge. We need analytical tools and critical perspectives to cater toward this new dimension of the discipline, a new dimension that partly relates back to tested methods in intermedia (word and image/word and music) studies and interart poetics (Brillenburg Wurth 2012), partly situates itself in research on media change and (post-)media (Manovich 2001; Thorburn and Jenkins 2004; Morris and Swiss 2006), and partly looks to digital humanities (Burdick et al. 2012) for ways of expanding approaches to writing, creativity, narratives, and poems, as well as considering objects of literary study such as hyperfiction, e-poetry, and algorithms that have, until today, been carefully kept out of the canon of works studied in universities and schools. How, in other words, can comparative literature reinvent itself with the help of intermedial methods from the past and digital media studies from the present and the future? To answer this question, I propose the following trajectory in this introduction. First, I outline the concepts of materiality and presence and their relevance to this book, showing how these concepts have been developed in the 1980s and 1990s against the backdrop of the digital revolution. Secondly, I show how the idea of book presence has come to be a point of focus in the practice of comparative literature, and how this book is situated in state-of-the-art research in comparative textual media. Third, and last, I present an overview of the sections and chapters of Book Presence in a Digital Age: the contributions to a comparative literature hovering between art-, media-, and literary criticism.

I In this section I focus on materiality, presence, and book presence, respectively. As critical concepts, materiality and presence grew especially prominent in the 1980s, perhaps precisely when the “immaterial”—materiality deferred or in any case transformed through immediacy effects on the basis of digital technologies: coded, pixelated, virtual—became a dimension of everyday life. Jean-François Lyotard investigated this dimension in the famous 1985 exhibition Les Immateriaux, which he curated with Thierry Chaput on the invitation of the Center for Industrial Creation and the minister of culture. In effect, it is well known, this exhibition was an investigation into the postmodern condition as

Book Presence

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Lyotard had outlined it in his treatise of 1979 (Lyotard 1979). For Lyotard, the postmodern is not a period after the modern, but a rupture within the modern that calls in question its values, presuppositions, modes of knowledge, and representation. In art, this rupture creates the opening for experimentation and innovation: what lies beyond tested forms—or what these forms might have held within as resistant matter, a matter that is not to be mastered. Mastery and the mastery of man over nature (an issue that Theodor Adorno critically analyzed in his aesthetics of the sublime) is what Lyotard associated with the modern or “modern thinking” in a Cartesian vein. The immaterial he sided with the postmodern: the immodern, so to speak, in so far as the immaterial in his exhibition would somehow illustrate an immobilization of wo/man’s mastery over matter. This undoing of mastery Lyotard captured in the term “infancy” or “immaturity” that signaled a different possibility, a potentially different set of relations between wo/man and matter: an almost reversed relation captured in the experience of the sublime. For Lyotard the experience of the sublime revolved around an imaginative rupture on account of a felt realization that something (the infinite, the unrepresentable) cannot be presented (Lyotard 1988). Whereas in philosophies of the Enlightenment (cf. Immanuel Kant’s analytics of the sublime in his Critique of Judgment) this realization was followed by a subsequent realization that on the supersensible level of reason ideas of the infinite, or any other outrageously unimaginable idea, could still be thought, Lyotard recaptured the experience of the sublime entirely as an experience of matter: on the level of sensibility. The sublime for him was the mere wonder that there is something, rather than nothing, but this wonder involved the same overwhelming force that overtook the Kantian subject in the contemplation of ideas of the infinite. Wonder is a feeling of belonging and subjection, a reversal of roles that Lyotard theorized as the shock of the new: the undoing of the mastery of the subject through an “event” of matter, of artistic matter, that resists (re)cognition. In particular, Lyotard’s investigation of sensation and anima—of a tactile experience or a thinking of the body that revolves around a suddenly being touched, more precisely around the awakening of the ability to be touched, out of nothing—proved a fertile breeding ground for the growing critical interest in affect and materiality during the 1980s and 1990s (Lyotard 1993). This breeding ground was composed of multiple currents of thinking (Roland Barthes, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, and later of course Brian Massumi and Claire Colebrook), but we have chosen to zoom in on Les Immateriaux because the

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exhibition brought together two dimensions of thinking on materiality relevant for this book: on the one hand, a critical interest in sensation and materiality in relation to the postmodern as the “immodern,” on the other the presence of new media—or as Lyotard called it, telecommunication—technologies that triggered a reconsideration of sensibility and materiality. Lyotard’s point was that the postmodern condition demanded a new sensibility and this new sensibility was to a great extent informed by the different, apparently “immaterial” possibilities of communication and information dissemination enabled by new communication technologies. One could say that this was a sensibility beyond the modern (in Lyotard’s sense of the term) imagination in its response to new materialities, for the immaterial in Les Immateriaux was not set in opposition to matter. Rather, it was staged as its extension and experimental intensification through new technological networks that formed the basis of the postmodern. The immaterial is not the other or the “after” of matter as it was, so to speak, before the introduction of digital media technologies. Rather, it is a quality of matter of any kind—solid, telegraphic, metallic, or electric—that disrupts and defamiliarizes and, thus, has the potential to undo subjective mastery. Seen in this light, strictly speaking, the immaterial is the specifically material in so far as it awakens our ability to be touched. In Les Immateriaux Lyotard explored alternative materialities to show how new telecommunication technologies, if perhaps not entirely displacing the modern subject as master, then at least triggering her to think about the destabilizing effects of these technologies: how her relationship to the world might change. He did so through a playful experimentation with materialities other than, say, the “matter of paint” that modernist critics like Clement Greenberg had analyzed to determine the so-called essence of different art forms (Greenberg 1940). While modernism had started from substance and surface, Lyotard started from code and the possibility of the disappearance of the body. His play with new materialities exemplified the spirit of the age, to use a romantic metaphor, in that artists, writers, and poets became aware of code as a means of artistic creation and a means of integrating different art forms. Thus, literary practice expanded into digital art, while poets in the 1980s and 1990s could become poetic designers cooperating with computer programmers to create verbal-visual, verbal-aural, or verbal-visual-aural works born out of electronic matter. Perhaps Lyotard was following a McLuhanesque path of thinking when he rethought the subject in relation to such materiality (but in contrast to Marshall McLuhan, Lyotard in his analysis of the postmodern condition, precisely recognized different and

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indeterminate consequences to the introduction of a new medium technology) (Lyotard 1979). Master-less subjects are subject to technology, entangled in the web of media extensions that allegedly conditions the possibility of perception and experience. At the same time, however, we are subject to technology to the extent that such technology offers entirely new and far-reaching forms of control. Departing from Lyotard’s uses of the terms, the material and immaterial present two points on a continuum—very simply put: the point of the body and the point at which the body appears to cede to code, or where the boundaries between bodies and the objects of embodied experience appear to falter—but the concept of a continuum prevents these points to become opposites. Thus, we have seen, the immaterial is the specifically material in that it awakens a sensuous response-ability circumventing categories of understanding. The material is not matter, something to be grasped or ruled, it is expressive of a particular relation to the world (see also Yui 2015). It would lead too far to here give an extensive account of the concept of the material and materiality as it has been further developed during the last decades in philosophy, critical theory, anthropology, art, and literary criticism. Elaborating on Lyotard’s critical perspective, I merely mean to point out the complex interplay between the material and the immaterial for a better understanding of book presence in a digital age. If the material can be understood not as substance only but as a mirror of our perceptions and experiences, the immaterial partakes of the material in an infinite feedback loop between—as Hegel already pointed out in Phenomenology of Spirit—humanity and things in the world. Both the material and immaterial are, in other words, constituents and constitutive of mediation. Two dimensions of the interplay between the material and immaterial should be highlighted in the historically specific context of Les Immateriaux and its relation to this collection. First, while Lyotard was worried about the possibility of presence—the sublime wonder of the now here happening—in a technologically mediated world, his exhibition showed how the material is present even in an empty space that situates the visitor physically. I will save this observation for the second section of this introduction as I come to discuss the new material of the literary in the practice of comparative literature. For now, it is important to emphasize the awareness in the 1980s that (what Lyotard called) the new telecommunication technologies, as invisible and immaterial as they seemed in the constitution of experience, included and projected their own kind of materiality—if only as a frame for perception. Indeed, anthropologist Daniel Miller has argued with the help of Ernst Gombrich’s Sense of an Order (1979) and

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Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974), it is mostly invisible and immaterial frames, rather than objects or artifacts, that condition what we see and how we see and experience it (Miller 1987, 85–105; 2005, 5). As Miller puts it: The surprising conclusion is that objects are important, not because they are evident and physically constrain or enable, but often precisely because we do not “see” them. The less we are aware of them the more powerfully they can determine our expectations by setting the scene and ensuring normative behaviour, without being open to challenge. They determine what takes place to the extent that we are unconscious of their capacity to do so. (5)

The relation between frame and object highlights a dimension of the differential dynamic between the immaterial and material that is crucial for understanding book presence in a digital age. Let me try to elucidate this as follows. Frames can be values, norms, beliefs, institutions, structures—they can be seen as immaterial in so far as they remain undetected, but as material in so far as they shape our experience and behavior precisely because they go unnoticed. In Understanding Media (1964) Marshall McLuhan already explained this function of frames when he prophesied how media technologies evolve from ground to figure or figure to ground in the course of time. Tapping into Gestalt theory, McLuhan posited how a medium constituting a ground is an active technological and cultural container that sets the stage for modes of perception, sensibility, knowledge, knowledge dissemination, entertainment, and cultural as well as economic production. In McLuhan’s theory, the book and, together with it, the paper page and print, served as a ground for the so-called Gutenberg Galaxy that roughly opened with the advent of the printing press. Indeed, McLuhan argued, a public sphere as it was built in the early modern age would barely have been possible without the printed word (McLuhan 1962). After the Second World War, this ground started to shift. The uses of electric media opened a new ground that—Lyotard’s exhibition displayed—in turn enabled different modes of experience, and a new version of a public sphere (McLuhan 1967). Against this new ground, the medium of the book that was once invisible as such, since it was part of the frame of affordances through which we dealt with the world, shifted into the role of figure: an object to be seen and encountered in an electric sphere. By the earlier 1980s, when Lyotard worked on the exhibition of new materialities, this sphere was about to explode. Perhaps this explosion had already announced itself in the becoming visible of the medium of the book as an object of display in the preceding decades. As

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Johanna Drucker has described in The Century of Artists’ Books (1995), the book changed shape as a material artifact in the twentieth century, and did so ever more emphatically as of the late 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, as Drucker has shown, the variety of post–Second World War artists’ books indicates an apparently new freedom for the medium of the book: it became more than an instrument for the spreading of information. Other media took over this traditional function. The book became an object to be pondered on by artists and graphic designers as a vehicle to be used, as the renowned Dutch book designer Irma Boom has argued, to spread something else (Boom 2010). As the Gutenberg Galaxy gradually ceded to the era of the global village, books became complementary to new information technologies in the electronic and digital age and, as Boom argues, were thus enabled to spread information in a different way: in so far as they used their full (or, precisely, their unthought-of) physical potential (Boom 2010). They could do so as artists’ books— as mixed media- and recycling artists Doug Beube and Brian Dettmer illustrate in this book—sculptural, artistic objects in museum and gallery spaces, or as threedimensional, industrially produced objects effectively welding form and content. The Medium is the Massage (1967), cocreated by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, and produced by Jerome Agel, is an example of this different potential of the book—the paperback book—as an object industrially made but creatively merging form and content. An experimental collage of photographs, pictures, and typography, The Medium is the Massage is able to have its readers experience the “message” it purports to convey: how media change involves a transformation of the ways in which we perceive, feel, and relate to the world. It is beyond the scope of this introduction to make an inventory of experimental book design and typography in the post–Second World War era that is indicative of the shift from ground to figure of the book. Let it suffice to state that the marginalization of the book as a culturally formative technology triggered critics, artists, and practitioners of artists’ books as well as graphic designers to reflect on the specificities of the medium of the book: “The desire to engage with the elusive character of what constitutes a book is part of the impetus for my current project: to seek critical terms on which to examine a book’s bookness, its identity as a set of aesthetic functions, cultural operations, formal conceptions, and metaphysical spaces” (Drucker 1995, 7). The very idea to examine “a book’s bookness” intimates the book’s past-ness as ground: it is recognized, regarded, and explored as a presence in itself. As John Hamilton puts it in this book, “Faced with alternative technologies, the givenness of the book as an object of consciousness, the phenomenology of the codex, comes

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into stronger relief precisely as that which is presumed to go missing in our traffic with electronic formats” (33). Book presence—as we will explore such presence in this book—can thus be taken as the effect of an ongoing process of the becoming obsolescent of the book as ground: presence and obsolescence, the one implying the other, as the book precisely materialized when it became immaterial as an information medium: apparently inconsequential, superfluous. Presence was revived as a critical concept in the 1980s and 1990s, in the midst of the linguistic turn and the rapidly changing media environment that Lyotard tried to stage in Les Immateriaux. Different disciplines approached the concept of presence from different angles, with—for instance—a focus on embodiment in gender studies (Butler 1990; Bordo 1993), or on the material presence of language as écriture feminine (Kristeva 1969; 1974), a Heideggerian focus on Being and the limits of presentation in philosophy (Nancy 1993), or on the presence of the past as it may affect us in the present without us being able to touch it in return (Ankersmit 1994; 2005; Ghosh and Kleinberg 2013). Then, in his introduction to The Production of Presence (2004) Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht famously declared that it was time to shift the dominant focus on interpretation and meaning-making in the humanities. The task at hand was to include viewpoints on matter, substance, and embodiment: “Presence effects” and “meaning effects” needed to be taken into account in their complex interplay in historical—and by extension literary, artistic—analysis (2). “Presence” for Gumbrecht revolved around the “phenomena and conditions that contribute to the production of meaning, without being meaning themselves” (8). While this emphasis on the material settings of meaning partly seems a rehearsal of Marxist materialism, it also blends in with late capitalist experience economies with their focus on affect, immediacy, and nostalgia (Plate 2011, 24–26). This blending-in may need to make us wary of Gumbrecht’s presence project, as does the strange distinction he makes between meaning “itself ” on the one hand, and phenomena contributing to meaning production on the other. By contrast, this book shows, meaning can precisely be reconsidered as emerging out of the material explorations of what may constitute books and bookness—and out of our attentive engagement with books or bookish (Pressman 2009) objects. Meaning is part of a process engaged with matter, as explorations in the new materialism have made clear in the past decades (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). Nevertheless, Gumbrecht’s analysis of presence (which takes its point of origin in a conference on materialities of communication in the 1980s), and his

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plea to consider artifacts in their materiality rather than only in their capacity to signify, has clearly informed our choice of “book presence” as a frame for this book—and for the conference out of which this book has grown. Elaborating on Gumbrecht’s notions of presence and presentification we propose the following definition of book presence: The apparition of an “analog” information medium, including its material potential, restraints, uses, conditions of production and distribution, and its novel actualizations in a digitally mediated present.

We have chosen the term “apparition” to indicate the presence of the book as a continued presence of the past in the present, both seen (the physical shape of the book) and unseen (the uses of the book, the ideas, modes of thinking and knowledge acquisition it has enabled and promoted, and so forth). The term apparition adds to book presence the dimension of a specter—the specter of centuries of systems of bookmaking, book-spreading, book-reading, and writing—that must be taken into account when thinking about new pathways for the book to come. No less than the recent and creative interactions with digital media does the shadow of obsolescence, of worn-out shapes and roles of the book, help to constitute these new pathways. In turn, “novel actualizations” in our phraseology refers to the physical instantiations of the book that explore, challenge, or open up its limits, that creatively revisit the medium as a medium of information or, conversely, as Brian Dettmer proposes in this book, present it as “surplus material” that can be recycled and reexposed in new contexts (66). That is to say, “novel actualizations” here refers to the full range of experimental engagements with the book in the digital age, whether to reignite it in novel design as, say, a bearer of the literary to be read, of art to be displayed, of histories to be experienced, or to deconstruct it as a trace from the past, a broken ground that can no longer project and support the way we think. The book, mixed media artist Doug Beube puts it in his interview with Jessica Pressman, “is not representative of what’s possible in our life and in our contemporary times. We are moving from something familiar towards new uses for this medium, uses for which it was never intended. My art helps move us along this path” (67). And yet, the book opens up once more. What illustrates the inevitable interplay between “apparition” (the past) and “actualization” (the present and the future) that we propose in our approach to book presence is the concept of tabularity. Christian Vandendorpe has introduced this concept in From Papyrus to Hypertext (1998, 2009), but it has

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until now received little critical attention in studies in bookness and artists’ books, or in bookishness and experimental, multimodal, or electronic literature. In the 1960s–90s philosophers like Gilles Deleuze in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (1967) expressed their critiques of the medium of the book because of its presumed linearity—what Johanna Drucker has also referred to as the fixed sequence of the codex (Drucker 1997). Drucker is, however, much more nuanced about the ultimate indeterminacy and versatility of the codex as hosting more and less linearity, depending on the more and less controversial uses writers, artists, and designers may make of its bounded spaces. As she refreshingly comments on the issue: The issue that has galvanized the greatest amount of critical attention in contrasting electronic and traditional media . . . is . . . the notion of a distinction between linear conventions of the printed text and possible alternatives. Most of these discussions mistake the fixed form of print support for a rigid programmatic determination of reading. The experience of browsing a book, of flipping from index to notes to marginality and back, let alone of reading a tabloid newspaper, with its deliberately fragmented and polylinear pathways through its pages, quickly belies the myth of this convention. (Drucker 1997, 104)

As Drucker invokes the tabloid newspaper, she knowingly or unknowingly invokes a long history of print in Western culture that has precisely moved away from linear modes of presentation. Indeed, Vandendorpe has been at pains to show, book printing has from its start been defined in a contrast to linearity. Linearity belongs to the experience of listening to oral poetry, one word after the other, or of reading through scrolls before the introduction of the codex that still very much bore the imprint of oral culture: in scrolls there is no jumping forward or backward, there are just lines to be read sequentially in the most rigid of fashions. By contrast, Vandendorpe shows, once shaped by the “ergonomics of the codex, the text was no longer a linear thread that was unreeled, but a surface whose content could be seen from various perspectives” (34). Reading aides like the table of contents (introduced in the twelfth century), page numbers, the paragraph break indicated by a line break (introduced in the fifteenth century), the index, or the bibliography enabled such multiple entries into a text and handy oversight. Such aides, which “allow readers to consider the text the same way they look at a painting or tableau,” Vandendorpe calls tabular (34). This way of considering the “nature” of books and print as a balancing act

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between “textual continuity and .  .  . pictorial page layout,” as well as reading aides ingrained into that layout, troubles dichotomies between established and experimental uses of the book, or between old and new media as a dichotomy between linear and multi- or even nonlinear bearers. It helps us understand how the most experimental reinventions of the book with multiple pathways also enfold its oldest tabular aspects. Drucker’s reference to the tabloid newspaper is telling in this respect. Compared to the book, the newspaper is an even more radical version of the tabular imagination that more and more detaches itself from the “linearity of speech” in a mosaic configuration (37). That is to say, tabularity shows us in how far the book as well as print (as McLuhan already observed) is a visual medium and in how far print has detached itself from sequentiality without navigation. Significantly, Stéphane Mallarmé explored this mosaic configuration as a poetic space in Un coup de dés (1897), precisely by taking tabularity and the idea of the text as a surface to its extreme. If Mallarmé’s work is generally accepted to be among the earliest examples of experimental revisions of the book—of book presence as actualization—it always already carries the trace of book presence as apparition: its means and matter of experimentation are born out of the very techniques of printing and conventions of reading that the printing press, from its inception onward, has catapulted into history. This is why Ernst van Alphen, in his interview for this book, refuses to acknowledge any watershed moment in the actualization of the book in the digital age. As he illustrates on the basis of the genre of the photo book, nonlinear modes of browsing and (in Vandendorpe’s terminology) tabular ways of organizing the book have been part of the traditions of graphic printing since the nineteenth century. There is nothing specific to book presence in itself, van Alphen concludes, but the uses that we make of the book and the conventions we invent for it. Tabularity is an instance of this approach to medium specificity created through uses and traditions. Book presence, to reiterate, frames the full range of experimental engagements with the book in the digital age, whether to reignite it in novel design as a bearer of the literary to be read, of art to be displayed, of histories to be experienced, or to deconstruct it as a trace from the past, a broken ground that can no longer project and support the way we think. “Presence,” I have tried to point out, is not limited to any idea of a physical “in itself ” of the book. Presence is both material and immaterial, figure and ground, past and present, and for some contributors to this book presence is not even bookish matter at all but the material effect of

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the conventions and inventions that we—as users, makers, or distributors—have created for paper and books. Book presence, to use Alfred North Whitehead’s words, can thus be understood as general and as real potentiality: as a continuum of the virtual instantiabilities of the book, a continuum of virtual or potential materializations, and as the actualizations of this general potentiality through form, content, uses, inventions, and traditions (Whitehead 1929). As we aim to show, both this continuum and its virtual actualizations require something more than the hermeneutics of the print age. In the following section we elaborate on these requirements.

II Now that I have outlined the concepts of materiality and presence as well as explored the notion of book presence in its inevitable complexity, I proceed to sketch an outline of the study of book presence as it has evolved since the 1990s. In this outline I also highlight approaches relevant to our present project and the place of book presence in comparative literature. For me, having approached the matter in our 2012 conference from an interdisciplinary perspective with scholars, book artists, publishers, and writers, a first and necessary starting point is Charles Alexander’s Talking the Boundless Book (1995). Like our own project, Talking the Boundless Book cuts across academic and artistic practice. Just before debates on electronic literature sparked off a new critical interest in book history and book future, Talking the Boundless Book raised the question: What is a book? The book is boundless; it is a world. The book is without definition, without limitation, and it is especially so in the domain of book arts where the bounds, the conventional formats, of books have familiarly been stretched, broken, and reformed. Book arts and book design are the subject of Talking the Boundless Book: the book as figure, its physical shape, how that physicality has affected reading, looking, touching— and how that shape was then challenged by the digital. Significantly, what thus sparked off the debate on the question of the book converged with artistic practices and technological shifts that seemed to take place outside the critical scope of scholars of comparative literature: artists experimenting with book and/or page design, with the conceptual spaces of books and/or pages, and transformations in text production and dissemination in the new digital media. This “outside” was to affect literature profoundly.

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In 1995, the fields of book arts and literary studies were still wide apart. The mere idea of considering the artistic possibilities of books, let alone inquiring how the design of books or paper pages might impact storytelling or poetic expression, was still nascent in academic criticism. Apart from specialists in the field of book arts like Ulises Carrión, Charles Alexander, and Johanna Drucker, scholars in literary studies did not feel the urgency of exploring the materiality of books and paper pages until the late 1990s (excluding book historians, who have always considered the materiality of books and book culture in specific sociohistorical contexts, and scholars of zines in the 1970s– 90s). Broadly speaking, only when literary scholars started to become aware of the transformations and innovations that digital technologies could bring to storytelling and poetry did they also become aware of the book and paper pages as shaping technologies to be considered in literary analysis. N. Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines (2002) reflected the new sensibility in comparative literature. The latter was evolving into a field that included electronic literature and the study of new media that had enabled it. Comparison became a matter of comparing media: as the art of letters, literature in the age of new media became intertwined with digital technology—the language of code—and kinetic, visual, and aural modes of representation that code supported. The first decade of the new century thus witnessed new directions for the study of literary texts as media among other media. Such directions broadened the field of comparative literature as a discipline defined by print and configured by the aesthetics of print—that is to say: by a critical focus on ideas and signification, on cultural contexts, but not on the material conditions of possibility literature, such as paper or book technology. The medium of the literary thus remained invisible (Hayles 2004, 68). Groundbreaking research that investigated this medium in the transition to the digital age included Richard A. Lanham’s The Electronic Word (1993); Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space (1990, 2001); N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman (1999); My Mother Was a Computer (2005), and Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008); Brian Kim Stefans’s Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (2003); Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality (2004); Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool (2004); Peter Stoicheff ’s and Andrew Taylor’s The Future of the Page (2004); Adelaide Morris and Thomas Swiss’s New Media Poetics (2005); Bruce Clarke’s Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (2008); Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008); and Stephanie Harris’s Mediating Modernity (2009). These contributions, I have argued in Between Page and Screen (2012), “redefined paper-based literary writing as being

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constantly informed and refashioned by new media technologies, and vice versa. Such research has opened up a prominent space for media and computer theory within comparative literature, leading to the—justified—claim that it should start focusing on new modes of reading and writing: code reading, the writing of software programs—or the emergence of new dialects on the Internet” (3). Following this research, and in a variation on Emily Apter’s (2006) plea for a comparative practice without location or national predicate, I argued for an intermedial comparative literature with “no single material location” (1). The different chapters in Between Page and Screen aimed to show how comparative literature could re-orient itself in-between page and screen media and unraveled the materialities that literature, as an art of poetry and storytelling, had assumed through the introduction of new media since the later nineteenth century. Similar attempts in the field of new media textuality had already been made in Terry Harpold’s Ex-Foliations (2009), which unravels visual aspects of early hypertext fictions and changing modes of reading, or Jaishree K. Odin’s Hypertext and the Female Imaginary (2010), which analyzed literature and the new media through the lens of gender and cultural difference. In 2012, Paul Budra and Clint Burnham (2012) published From Text to Txting as a critical and pedagogical exploration of new materialities of the literary in the digital age and their uses in the twenty-first-century classroom, likewise adopting a comparative perspective between page and screens. Then, Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces (2014) bridged the field between media archaeology and literary studies through a media-critical reading of experimental writing and its interfaces. Manuel Portela’s Scripting Reading Motions (2013) likewise zooms in on experimental writing in print and electronic media, exploring how such writings could be approached as embodiments and simulations of reading in interpretive processes. Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media (2014) uncovers and accounts for the return to literary modernism in contemporary electronic literature, in effect showing how literary cultural memory works in the digital age as a multimodal process. Her awardwinning Reading Project (2015), cowritten with Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass, develops an integrated critical approach to new media textuality, showing how to do literary criticism in a digital age by welding close reading, visual aesthetics, critical code studies, and cultural analytics. Meanwhile, Daniel Punday’s Computing as Writing (2015) has offered a timely intervention in the changing role of authorship and authority in an age transitioning from bookbound to digital information.

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Already this brief overview attests to the growth of a new field in comparative literature that Pressman and Hayles—as indicated in the beginning of this introduction—have proposed to integrate into the interdiscipline of comparative textual media. In this comprehensive approach, literature is seen in its interaction with new media technologies, and is recognized as having been affected and remediated through these technologies since the nineteenth century (2013: x). However, comparative textual media was not only designed as a comprehensive frame for teaching and research on new media textualities. It also aimed to integrate research in book history, the history of print, paper, and the paper page, and studies focused on current reconfigurations of the book, print, and the paper page in poetry and literary narratives. Such a comprehensive approach that merges book studies and literary studies is becoming more and more common in comparative literature. Expanding research on visual text, graphic novels, and cartoons (Bredehoft 2014; Baetens and Frey 2014), imaginative works in book and literary history like Andrew Piper’s Dreaming in Books (2009), Leah Price’s How to do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012), Lisa Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge (2014), or Alexander Starre’s Metamedia (2015) are just a few instances of the innovative styles of doing literary and cultural analysis from a materialist perspective that assigns agency to things (Latour 2005; Gell 1998). New materialism, as developed in sociology, philosophy, archeology and anthropology, is thus integrally part of comparative textual media as a field bridging literary studies, book history, and digital humanities. The present book contributes to this comprehensive approach with its conceptual analysis of book presence and its unique integration of literary, cultural, and artistic approaches to the question of the book. We offer presentday and longer-term perspectives, theoretical and interpretive approaches, and interviews to probe presentifications of the book as apparition and actualization, showing how it continues to inspire as idea and material form. More than twenty-two  years after Talking the Boundless Book, has the potentiality of the book changed significantly? How has it expanded and transformed in the interaction with new media?

III This final section presents an overview of the chapters in our book. The two first chapters offer a theoretically informed overview of the idea of book presence

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in the digital age. John Hamilton’s “Pagina Abscondita: Reading in the Book’s Wake” and Garrett Stewart’s “From Codex to Codecs” critically and consistently analyze current de-/manifestations of the book as not an anachronistic stagnation but a creative and constant interaction with a digitally mediated world. Hamilton starts from two historical approaches to the book  that he epitomizes in a classical Greek and a Catholic perspective: “an approach that refuses to tear meaning apart from its mediating form” and “an approach that handles the book as a corporeal object containing a meaningful soul within,” respectively (41). Exploring the implications of these perspectives, Hamilton argues that the persistence of the book’s iconology within the digital era reveals the significant emotional investment that our society had placed into the physical book prior to the advent of digital technologies, as well as the fundamentality of its presence today. While Hamilton is concerned with the book as a bearer of the literary, and in this respect still considers the book in a functional perspective, Garrett Stewart expands the presence of the book into a visual, artistic presence: a presence on display. Stewart organizes his account around the idea of the skeumorph, which Hayles in How We Became Posthuman had defined as “a design feature that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time” (17). In Stewart’s chapter, the skeumorph is used as a metaphor for the ways in which “bookishness” (Pressman 2009) emerges nowadays in the visual arts as so-called bibliobjets. Bibliobjets include any artifact that reflects on and problematizes traditional roles and designs of books. Such objects are part of a larger phenomenon of the de-mediation of the book, referring to a process that empties the book out of its readable content so that what remains is a display object in galleries and museums. Mostly unreadable—that is, in contrast to what we familiarly consider reading to be—bibliobjets push readers and viewers to explore the mediality of books. This first section of Book Presence is concluded with a double interview that Jessica Pressman has conducted with artists Doug Beube and Brian Dettmer. Taking Pressman’s concept of bookishness as a starting point, the interview offers multiple takes on the potentiality of the book in the digital age: the potentiality of its shapes, its meanings, and the writing on the wall it may be said to present as an old, and often discarded information medium in an age that has witnessed a dramatic acceleration of information streams. The second section of Book Presence zooms in on media change and the materiality of books, which also involves new media platforms and modes of

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publishing. The section opens with Hannes Bajohr’s “Infrathin Platforms: Print on Demand as Auto-Factography” which provides a reflection on a new dimension of book circulation, access, and production, and how this new dimension reshapes the relationship between publishers, authors, and consumers. Bajohr illustrates how print on demand (POD) triggers new dynamics in the conceptualization, construction, and reception of a literary work. The argument Bajohr is proposing develops further the characteristics of what Hayles has called technotexts: the kinds of texts that interrogate their inscription technologies, activating a reflexive loop between the works themselves and the material object representing them as corporeal presences. Bajohr furthers this concept in his notion of auto-factography, which adds a performative dimension to the reflexive loops the works initiate. Following up on publishing platforms, Anna Poletti’s “Genre and Materiality: Autobiography and Zines” operationalizes materiality as a regulative frame for the study of zines in the digital age. The idea of a regulative frame is grounded in affordances theory, and Poletti uses this theory to explain how the materiality of zines shapes their cultural perception as vehicles for self-life-writing. Her central argument is that when presented in the form of the zine, the act of self-life-writing is extended beyond linguistic and narrative representation to reflect on the mediality of the social field. As the third chapter in this section, Liedeke Plate’s “Doing Things with Literature in a Digital Age: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and the Material Turn in Literary Studies” starts from the assumption that materiality is—and has always been—a feature of all novels. Tracing the material turn in the humanities and social sciences, Plate explores its implications for the study of literature. Specifically, Plate addresses the need to (re-)materialize literary studies from several different angles, discussing the lack of a language to speak of the materiality of reading and the resulting impoverishment of sense experience, the reduction of a multisensory experience to a mental activity, and the ensuing neglect of the act of reading’s many and diverse social and cultural meanings. The material turn, in Plate’s contribution, proves crucial for understanding literature and literary culture in the first place. Finally, Yra van Dijk’s and Emma de Vries’s “‘Book for Loan’: S. as Paradox of Media Change” invokes the concepts of media convergence and bookishness in an attempt to unravel the paradox central to S. in that it performs, narrates, but also deconstructs the fetishization of the book. Like Plate’s chapter, the last contribution in this section focuses more on the medium than mediations of the book.

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Section II is followed by an interview with Mark Z. Danielewski conducted by Inge van de Ven and Kári Driscoll. The interview zooms in on monumentality, physicality and the literary, visual design and literary meaning (and the prejudices held against it), and Danielewski’s concept of the signiconic: the melding of literary and visual form. The question is raised whether experimental novels like Danielewski’s House of Leaves will have marked, in the future, a substantial change in literary history or will have remained among other fringe examples of the signiconic. And then, there is the question of cats and The Familiar. The chapters in the third section of Book Presence engage in a search for new potential of print media: the chapters in this section focus on the specific conceptual possibilities of the book. As the chapters show, the medium of the book triggers critical reflections on conceptual art, alphabetic writing, and ways of world-making. Simon Morris’s “Learn to Read Differently” considers what the role of the material is in conceptual writing. This chapter analyzes not only the relationship between the idea and the instance of writing, but also the material production of writing and how these are intertwined. Morris offers an artist’s perspective on the issue of book presence, and writes about his project The Royal Road to the Unconscious, a remake of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams—yes, in the famous English translation by James Strachey in its 1985 edition. The Royal Road to the Unconscious is a rewrite of Freud’s exploration of the unconscious beyond the book (and then again back into it) in an attempt to perform this exploration as an irrational procedure. Secondly, to illustrate the potential of the book as the result of a conceptual act, Morris records his attempt to copy Jack Kerouac’s On the Road word for word, a work he had never read. How is copying perceived as a creative act, and what kind of book is a book that has been copied originally? As the second chapter in this section, Lisa Gitelman’s “Emoji Dick and the Eponymous Whale” researches visual linguistic traditions and networked modes of production for the book. Comparable to Morris’s Kerouac project, Emoji Dick is a conceptual book in that its materialization reflects on a new sociotechnical milieu that renders it ever more difficult to distinguish wo/man-made from algorithmic texts (Raley 2016, 133). How do we read apparently unreadable works, and how do these works reveal the transformations of alphabetic writing in the digital age? The third chapter in this section, “The Demediation of Alphabetic Writing,” links up with this question of alphabetic writing, and its relation to memory, and the book conceived as an archive in the digital age. How does book presence change as a bearer of the literary in regard to graphic, experimental uses of alphabetic writing—and as it reflects on the possibility of the end of alphabetic writing?

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What happens to literature and literary analysis when alphabetic writing is emptied out of its signifying potential? The last chapter in this final section is Inge van de Ven’s “Revisiting the Book-as-World: World-Making and Book Materiality in Only Revolutions and The Atlas.” The idea of the book as world was briefly discussed by Steven Clay in Talking the Boundless Book, where he gestured at the ability of books to be a container of worldly experience “because of their legacy, intimate scale, and everyday presence” (1995, 25). He then cites Barbara Farner, who once, in a continuation of early modern ideas, stated how the world is like a book: a book, in Farner’s conception, is not merely a container of text, but it is a manifold, living being, a world (26). Comparing the work of Mark Z. Danielewski and William T. Vollmann, van de Ven’s chapter connects to this conception of the book form, as the form and content in the works she analyzes clearly work together in order to convey their “worldliness.” Beyond commenting on the structural and aesthetic features, of the works under consideration however, what is crucial in her analysis is the meta-reflexive comments the narratives here provide on their frames and self-enclosed nature. These remarks within the novels invite reflection on, and provide a sense of defamiliarization with, the conceptual range of the book frame. This final section is followed by an interview that I conducted with the comparative literature scholar Ernst van Alphen, a specialist in the field of trauma, memory, and the book as archive (as witness his latest work Staging the Archive. Art and Photography in the Age of New Media (2014)). In this interview, van Alphen makes the point, first, that the medium specificity of books does not reside in their material properties, their alleged essence, but in the uses that we make of books so that we create affordances for it. Secondly, he argues that what we now may hail as innovative shapes of and for the book have always been a dimension of one particular book genre: the photo book. In the interview van Alphen shows by means of a number of examples how photo books have always eschewed linearity and how, today, the established genre of the photo book has inspired different potentialities for the book. Before you, dear reader, delve further into this book, I would like to express my thanks to the Dutch Netherlands Research Council (NWO) for making the conference on Book Presence possible and for contributing to the publication of this book. During the conference, there was a woman who had been present in my life for quite some years as a friend, and she was, let us say, a specialist in books and authors: Helen Tartar. She was present at the conference in 2012, defending the case for books. Due to a fatal car accident she could never complete her contribution to this book. Instead, we contribute this book to her memory.

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Works cited Alexander, Charles, ed. 1995. Talking the Boundless Book: Art, Language, and the Book Arts. Minneapolis: Minnesota Center for the Book Arts. Alphen, Ernst van. 2014. Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ankersmit, Franklin Rudolf. 1994. History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor. Berkeley : University of California Press. Ankersmit, Franklin Rudolf. 2005. Sublime Historical Experience. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Apter, Emily. 2006. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Baetens, Jan and Frey, Hugo. 2014. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bolter, Jay David. 2001. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Boom, Irma. 2010. The Architecture of the Book. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam. Bordo, Susan. 1993, 2003. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley : University of California Press. Bredehoft, Thomas A. 2014. The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from Beowulf to Maus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene, ed. 2012. Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace. New York: Fordham University Press. Budra, Paul and Burnham, Clint. 2012, eds. From Text to Txting: New Media in the Classroom. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Burdick, Anne, Drucker, Johanna, Lunenfeld, Peter, Presner, Tod and Schnapp, Jeffrey. 2012. Digital Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Butler, Judith. 1990, 2007. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Clarke, Bruce. 2008. Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems. New York: Fordha, University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1993. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Dolphijn, Rick and van der Tuin, Iris. 2012. The New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. London: Open Humanities Press. Drucker, Johanna. 1995 (2004). The Century of Artists’ Books. New York: Granary Books. Drucker, Johanna. 1997. “The Self-Conscious Codex. Artists’ Books and Electronic Media.” Substance 26: 1 (82), 93–112.

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Emerson, Lori. 2014. Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ghosh, Ranjan and Klein, Ethan, eds. 2013. Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gitelman, Lisa. 2014. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke University Press. Gombrich, Ernst. 1960 (1979). Art and Illusion. London: Phaidon. Greenberg, Clement. 1940. “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” The Partisan Review, 296–310. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2004. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Harpold, Terry. 2009. Ex-Foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harris, Stephanie. 2009. Mediating Modernity: German Literature and the “New” Media. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2002. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2004. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Mediaspecific Analysis.” Poetics Today 25 (1): 67–90. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2005. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2008. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Hayles, N. Katherine and Pressman, Jessica, eds. 2013. Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2008. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1969. Semiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse. Paris: Tel Quel. Kristeva, Julia. 1974. La Révolution Du Langage Poétique: L’avant-Garde À La Fin Du Xixe Siècle, Lautréamont Et Mallarmé. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. Lanham, Richard. 1993. The Electronic Word: Technology, Democracy, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liu, Alan. 2004. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Minuit. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. L’Inhumain. Causeries sur les temps. Paris: Galilée. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1993. Moralités postmodernes. Paris: Galilée. Mallarmé, Stéphane. 1897, 1914. Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.Paris: Librairie Gallimard. Gallica: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k71351c. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McGann, Jerome. 2004. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. London: Palgrave. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin. 1967. The Medium Is the Massage. Produced by Jerome Agel. New York; London; Toronto: Bantam Books. Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Miller, Daniel, ed. 2005 Materiality. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Morris, Adelaide and Swiss, Thomas, eds. 2006. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993. The Birth to Presence. Translated by Brian Holmes and others. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Odin, Jaishree K. 2010. Hypertext and the Female Imaginary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Piper, Andrew. 2009. Dreaming in Books. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Plate, Liedeke. 2011. Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Portela, Manuel. 2013. Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer and SelfReflexive Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pressman, Jessica. 2009. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (4). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo. act2080.0048.402 Pressman, Jessica. 2013. Digital Modernism: Making It New In New Media. New York: Oxford University Press. Pressman, Jessica, Marino, Mark, and Douglas, Jeremy. 2015. Reading Project: A Collaborative Reading of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. Price, Leah. 2012. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Punday, Daniel. 2015. Computing as Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Raley, Rita. 2016. “Algorithmic Translations.” The New Centennial Review 16 (1): 115–37. Starre, Alexander. 2015. Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization. Chicago: University of Iowa Press. Stefans, Brian Kim. 2003. Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics. Berkeley : Atelos Press. Stoicheff, Peter and Taylor, Andrew, eds. 2004. The Future of the Page. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Thorburn, David and Jenkins, Henry. 2004. Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vandendorpe, Christian. 1998 (2009). From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library. Translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929 (1979). Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press.

Part One

Theory and Overview

2

Pagina Abscondita: Reading in the Book’s Wake John T. Hamilton

In the electronic anthill, where are the edges? The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets. John Updike (2006) Books were once such handsome things. Suddenly they seem clunky, heavy, almost fleshy in their gross materiality. Their pages grow brittle. Their ink fades. Their spines collapse. They are so pitiful, they might as well be human. Ben Ehrenreich (2011) By now, the question whether the printed book will survive the digital age is less relevant than the anxieties that still drive this concern among writers and readers alike. The possible but improbable consequence that print will one day vanish hardly matters as much as the persistent fears that the physical book is already becoming obsolete, even when all evidence points to the contrary. Despite the nearly constant barrage of McLuhanite prophecies and Amazonian eulogies, despite the shrinking budgets of our public and research libraries, despite the market-driven craving for technological innovation, the codex persists and, as far as anyone can tell, will continue to persist. As electronic devices and resources continue to proliferate, overtaking more and more of our daily lives, the demand for print grows unabated. For whatever reasons, for whatever motives, regardless of the liberating options now available, regardless of the expense and the clutter and the countless inconveniences, the bound edition, the volume that we grasp, perseveres, grasping us and binding us. Fearful concerns over the fate of the book imply that digital media and especially electronic publishing are somehow alarming forces that threaten to usurp what is held so dear. But does such a fatal contest in fact exist? Certainly,

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when viewed from a broader perspective, digitization appears to be but another phase in a very long history of transformations and improvements, yet one more permutation in an ongoing development that has readily passed from clay and wooden tablets to papyrus rolls, from parchment to paper codices, from woodblock and movable-type printing to offset lithography. There is no need to rehearse this career of diversification to realize that the latest trends in electronic writing, publishing, and reading constitute merely a new chapter in the advancement of a basic technology that has always been designed to register, store, and circulate information.1 Hardly a dangerous supplement, digitization appears to be a beneficial complement, a cybernetic enhancement of what the book has always done, namely, transmitting language across time and space. An efficacious extension of publishing capacity, digital technology does not smother our bibliophilia, but rather allows it to flourish. Speculation on the “death of the book,” whether pronounced enthusiastically or despondently, is therefore idle. We have long been accustomed to the fact that the emergence of one technology in no way necessarily spells the demise of another. Medial coexistence has generally been the norm, not the exception. Microfilm and microfiche did not supplant the book, any more than radio, cinema, or television. Moreover, declaring some triumph of digital over print media fails to recognize how each mode informs the other, how features of both technologies replicate and pass into each other, resulting in a mutual alteration that dismantles any rigorous opposition. Software retains the paper format of the page—lines, paragraphs, margins, whiteness, flatness, numbering, and so on— just as digital strategies have come to influence recent experiments in printed literature.2 Conversely, key inventions in the history of the book significantly anticipate and often directly prescribe cybernetic formatting and processes: the illustrations, calligraphy, and marginalia of illuminated manuscripts; the lists, cross-references, and annotated commentaries of medieval glossaria; the dynamic interplay of title, emblem, and subscript in baroque iconologies; the cartographic and labyrinthine relations of the encyclopedia; the footnotes and endnotes, the indices and bibliographies of scholarly texts. Modernist enterprises like Le Livre, Mallarmé’s unrealized or perhaps unrealizable magnum opus, comprising some two hundred unbound pages of preparatory notes and sketches for the performance of an all-inclusive yet infinitely open work, an alchemical pendant to his striking innovations in typography and the disposition of the poetic page; the compendious and commodious novels of Proust and Joyce, which are best regarded in terms of interconnecting assemblages and rhizomatic

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networks; the Passagen-Werk, that vast collection of disparate citations, which Walter Benjamin registered and programmed for access to nineteenth-century Paris—all can rightly be appreciated as structural and functional forebears to the designs, processes, links, and storage zones of our current electrified capabilities.3 If digitization induces feelings of deprivation, then this perception would appear to be a mere phantasm with no corroboration, a delusion that is presumably symptomatic of a more profound cause. What, then, would be the source or sources of these anxieties? What might the ubiquitous litanies of resentment tell us about our relationships to the printed word, about our approaches to writing and reading, about our expectations and desires? Should we grant some credence to these fears, we would have to admit that speculation on the death of the book is not idle at all, insofar as it maintains that digitization eliminates the need for something believed to be vitally important. We would have to acknowledge the affective responses that are currently being voiced from multiple perspectives, lamenting a variety of deficiencies, which are obstinately felt amid all the gains afforded by electronic resources. As the announcement to “digitize everything” spreads, traditionalists draw attention to perceived omissions, justifiably or not. Despite all the conveniences furnished by digitization—accessibility, portability, and acceleration, the countless additional capacities to search, edit, and share, the sheer ease and limitless opportunities to work with and on language—despite all these obvious advantages and more, conservatives complain that something is being left out or behind, that something is fatally being overlooked or forgotten, that the boundless opportunities afforded by the new formats are in fact obstructive, eclipsing the light that hitherto illuminated our engagement with written language. Irrespective of rational and empirical arguments, irrespective of the clear marks of continuity between analog and digital platforms, expressions of nostalgia or even mourning crop up repeatedly, always in a demoralized, elegiac tone.4 One could, of course, ascribe such attachment to naïve sentimentality, sensuous pleasure, or sheer habit. Cherished are the ceremonies connected with handling the printed book, the complex play of textures, the flesh of fingertips caressing the flesh of the page, touching and being touched. For many of us, the look, the sound, and the scent of firm covers and inscribed paper possess a seductive, almost irresistible power. “We’re olfactory creatures, after all, emotionally stimulated by smells, and books often greet us with their own unique bouquet of paper, glue, dust, and other hard-to-define but instantly recognizable whiffs that stimulate memories of reading things we loved” (Hughes 2010). The

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architecture of the book as a manufactured object, the size, binding and stitching, the weight, grain and opacity of the leaves, the edges, rough-cut or smooth, all the various elements that compose its physical presentation communicate a unique character, exerting a distinct fascination. The magnetic allure of bookstores may have much to do with intellectual curiosity, consumerist desire, or simple sociability, but these do not preclude other kinds of motivations. The shelves, stalls, and tables are approached with an array of countless intentions and impulses, often commingling some blend of vague hankering, hallowed reverence, or erotically tinged titillation. Recent literature is replete with such depictions, like the opening sequence in Don DeLillo’s Mao II: He walked among the bookstore shelves, hearing Muzak in the air. There were rows of handsome covers, prosperous and assured. He felt a fine excitement hefting a new book, fitting hand over sleek spine, seeing lines of type jitter past his thumb as he let the pages fall. He was a young man, shrewd in his fervors, who knew there were books he wanted to read and others he absolutely had to own, the ones that gesture in special ways, that have a rareness or daring, a charge of heat that stains the air around them. (DeLillo 1991, 19)

The editions that especially beckon the reader are the more flirtatious, adventuresome ones that “gesture in special ways,” emitting an incandescence that embarrassingly raises the temperature, triggering an urgent need to possess, in contrast to the books that he simply wants to read. Well before any consideration of textual content, well before any cognitive appraisal, the books’ material gleam draws the reader in. By whetting the sensuous appetite of the consumer, the volumes singled out betray their fetishistic character. Tellingly, in DeLillo’s novel, the man who here gives in to the bookstore’s temptations is Scott Martineau, the personal assistant of the main protagonist, the author Bill Gray, who prefers to stay out of public view and is even reluctant to publish his latest work out of fear of becoming a commodity. The fact that DeLillo first introduces his protagonist in the form of his own novels, as Martineau passes by the store’s “modern classics” section, reveals that the game is already lost. Fetishization may go a long way in explaining why readers are compelled to hold on to print, as if the book retained its power as sacred object or magical grimoire, even now in a thoroughly secularized age. Hence, the book still enjoys value as a symbol of social or individual stature. That said, now assailed by the equally fetishistic character of new media, perhaps it is simply the book’s material presence that we are hesitant to abandon: a durability that opposes the lightness

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and the wearying radiance of the screen, a sense of the real in contrast to the merely virtual, a decisive closure that preserves the word from a communicative world now swimming in constant updates and instant messaging, live streaming and sharing, a specific love for the word—a specific philology—that would see in the book’s borders the very boundaries between author and text and world that are being worn away by the electronic revolution, an affect that compels us never to let go, even if, or precisely because, the book does not appear to be going anywhere. The question, again, is not whether the print volume is or is not on the way to extinction. It is not whether such apprehensions are or are not justified, but rather why this particular shift in medium or format, this migration from page to screen, repeatedly elicits agitated reactions and apocalyptic rants. What do they believe is being obliterated, when the letter is produced by pixels instead of ink? While it may be shortsighted or purely reactionary to accuse new media with causing some loss, with intentionally killing off the old, it is hardly an exaggeration to identify these technological developments as a precipitating factor. All the same, it would be more fruitful to view the establishment of different platforms and practices as an occasion to define with greater clarity what existed before or otherwise. That is to say, the fact of digitization sets up the contrastive conditions by which we can assess humankind’s historical relationships to books. It allows us to determine the precise nature of our investments in the codex. The physical grappling with the book’s heft while cognitively attending to the text at hand seems to unite the body and the mind in ways that arguably occur to a lesser degree when facing a screen. To be sure, the keyboard and the touchscreen do allow for some tactility, but for the book lover these features only count as weak compensations that fail to override general effects of distance and separation. Even though a tablet is still held in our hands, even if we still use our fingers to flip from one page to the next, electronic reading seems to remove us from a sense of density. We are not only denied the spread and distinction of recto and verso, left and right, we also watch how each single page, once read, disappears into nowhere, allowing no means of orientation, no means of measuring how far we have been or have to go, save for a rather abstract band of numbers that exchanges a qualitative sense for one that is merely quantitative. Incapable of transcending the flatness of the screen, restricted to the surface of things, we are said to lose a certain opportunity for absorption. As it is frequently argued, the platitudinous state of affairs tempts us all the more to browse, scroll, and skim.

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Although it could be countered that separation, distance, and a general resistance to absorption have always been the hallmarks of critical reading, for detractors of the new medium, the screen is something that screens us out, permitting us to adopt a more lackadaisical disposition, one that may be interested, but only in the most superficial, noncommittal way. Hence, a perception of imminent loss or castration yields to widespread fetishizing of the book, which of course, like every fetish, nourishes the very anxiety it aimed to cure. Ian Samson presumes to speak for many when he confesses unapologetically that “we are, simply, paper fanatics and paper fundamentalists: even when it’s not there, when it has been shown to be unnecessary or not to exist, we continue to imagine it, to honor it, and to wish it into being” (Samson 2012, xvi–xvii). This fundamentalism, which insists both on paper and on paper’s role as foundation, in gesturing toward the theological may help explain not only the deep consternation over the projected annihilation of printed matter but also the dogged resolve to stave off this demise, to swear by paper and ink. For these sworn fundamentalists, for these obstinate diehards, digitization does, indeed, pose a singular threat. For them, the menace is real, even if, at least for now, the holy war against the infidels suspected of cheating the world of bound volumes appears to be successful. Even though the physical book still thrives, there remains a lingering fear that the cause will soon be lost, that the road to the evanescence of print has already been paved. It would be a mistake to dismiss such forebodings, however delusional or phantasmatic, however disproven by actual circumstances. Emotions have never been expected to respect rational or empirical arguments. Rather, it would be worthwhile and important to investigate this rampant sense of bereavement, to interrogate this conviction that one is being divested of what one loves. The fears expressed in the warning of the book’s looming death are amply strong to instigate conservative reactions, like the fanaticism and fundamentalism just mentioned. And in point of fact, radical changes are afoot. Writing and reading practices are certainly being transformed, irrefutably so. The suspicion that many aspects of former habits are being profoundly and irreversibly modified, that some will have already died off, is not unfounded. There is indisputably a solicitous love for the printed book that charges the new technologies with grave omissions, a specific philology that regards digital conversion as frighteningly privative. It articulates a valid concern, namely that current innovations are robbing us of an engagement that should not be passed off as negligible or dispensable, an engagement, moreover, that only now may be recognizable in direct contrast to our digitized experiences.

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Insofar as, according to proverbial wisdom, we only know what we have after it is gone, the digital revolution should help us to delineate better the contours of the ancien régime. For many of us who have witnessed the transition to digitization, there is, indeed, a sense of living on in the wake of something passing away, something about to be left behind for good, something that perhaps we ourselves are responsible for relinquishing. At least for some of us, the delight in enjoying our electronic devices may be marred by a nagging, unspecified guilt, as if we have performed a harsh amputation, as if a vital part has been removed from the whole: an inverted metonymy, a deforming mutilation, a fateful ellipsis. Faced with alternative technologies, the givenness of the book as an object of consciousness, the phenomenology of the codex, comes into stronger relief precisely as that which is presumed to go missing in our traffic with electronic formats. The presence of the screen or tablet invites a reassessment of the form and function of the physical library. As the journalist Verlyn Klinkenborg observes in a recent commentary, when considered alongside the titles on his computer, the books that still rest on his shelves seem to have assumed a fresh purpose. Whereas in the past, the printed volumes simply and silently took up space, they now serve as “constant reminders,” which have become decidedly vocal: They say, “We’re still here,” or “Remember us?” These are the very things that e-books cannot say, hidden under layers of software, tucked away in the cloud, utterly absent when the iPad goes dark. This may seem like a trivial difference, but that’s not how it feels. Reading is inherently ephemeral, but it feels less so when you’re making your way through a physical book, which persists when you’ve finished it. It is a monument to the activity of reading. It makes this imaginary activity entirely substantial. But the quiddity of e-reading is that it effaces itself. (Klinkenborg 2013, 10)

What Klinkenborg finds lacking in e-reading is the physical persistence of the book, which gives material form to a voice that asserts continued presence (“We’re still here”) and a need for attention (“Remember us?”). In addition to serving as a vehicle for transmitting some ideational content, in addition to effacing itself as a medium before the mediated text, the book announces itself. Here, the trope of personification transforms the book into a speaking object, into an animate being or living body that communicates itself in addition to communicating a textual or visual message. Apart from operating as a container of information, the bound book memorializes “the activity of reading,” an activity that is thereby made “entirely substantial.” Long after a book’s content has been read—decoded,

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processed, interpreted, evaluated—its material form endures as a body that is self-referential. The form of the book, its stark presence, although closed over and for the moment unread, nonetheless addresses the reader, demanding acknowledgment. By virtue of this address, by virtue of this strange eloquence, the form of the book counts as content in its own right. Observations of this sort are not uncommon. In essence, they claim that the physical book, when compared with its electronic counterpart, is—again— something “substantial.” In the most ordinary sense, this term is being used to describe something firm and stable, something tangible, something real. The substantiality of the book refers to its empirical presence both as the material support of the text and as an object in its own right; and it is qua object, that the book overrides its mediating function and instead stages a physical, immediate or non-mediating encounter. Alternatively, one might say, as a technology, the book mediates itself, presenting itself to the senses and the mind of the reader: one living body face to face with another. In contrast, as Klinkenborg’s description above makes explicit, the e-book is mediated by an ancillary technology, which compromises its presentness. When the device “goes dark,” the book is “utterly absent.” Ascribing insubstantiality to an electronically mediated text implies a certain dematerialization just as asserting the substantiality of the printed volume suggests material recalcitrance. The charge, which again may or may not be ultimately justifiable, is that digital processing has wrested words and images from the bonds of the bound book, rendering it nearly weightless. Although it is true that the shape and function of the paper page continue to organize the electronic spectacle of reading, these features are, in a decisive fashion, altogether phantomlike, mere vestiges of outmoded practices, like the forms of tree trunks, branches, and foliage that appear in the hewn stone of a Gothic cathedral. As many digital artists and innovators have demonstrated, there is no inherently practical need to retain the physical limitations of print formats, apart from the desire to accommodate ingrained, cultural habits. Familiarity is a key element of user-friendliness. Despite this welcoming familiarity, Jonathan Franzen continues to denounce the digital era. For this American novelist and essayist, expelling the physical book from our lives and culture robs us of a signal opportunity: What happens to people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were

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shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of selfpromotional decibel levels? (Franzen 2013b; cf. 2013a, 273)

We can see that the writer’s most pressing concerns have to do with the kinds of self-publication and self-promotion that electronic formats seem to encourage, with the ways in which the new technology enables writers of questionable talent or vision to disseminate their views without submitting themselves to the procedures of peer-review, copyediting, and professional critique, procedures that have hitherto presumably served to guarantee quality. At the rate of milliseconds, electronic networks procreate fame out of the basest material. Drawing postimperial analogies between fin-desiècle Vienna and contemporary America, Franzen poignantly cites from his recent translation of Karl Kraus: “Believe me, you color-happy people, in cultures where every blockhead has individuality, individuality becomes a thing for blockheads” (“Glaubt mir, ihr Farbenfrohen, in Kulturen, in denen jeder Trottel Individualität besitzt, vertrotteln die Individualitäten”).5 The term rendered here as “blockhead”—Trottel—vividly describes the idiot who “trots” about mindlessly and carelessly, a figure that correlates well with Franzen’s assessment of writers who indulge in shallow ephemera dispatched to thousands of fans and friends, whose admiration and friendship are debatable. Franzen longs for a more profound communication, “individual to individual,” which is clearly opposed to the broadcasted individuality that he deems worthless. But Franzen’s remark touches on issues that go even further. The desired communication is only possible “in the quiet and permanence of the printed word.” Like Klinkenborg, Franzen is making a claim that is motivated by the trope of personification, whereby the book is treated as an eloquent, animate being, as an individual subject, present and ready for conversation. And also like Klinkenborg, Franzen bases this idea of subjectivity on a quality of permanence, on a quality of identity maintained over time. As Franzen remarks elsewhere, “I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.”6 The book thus attains the status of individual identity by exhibiting a stability and durability that Franzen finds consoling, because it provides ballast in an ever-shifting world. “When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take a book off the shelf it still says

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the same thing—that’s reassuring” (in Singh 2012). In contrast, the electronically transmitted text exacerbates conditions of flux. Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels that we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough. (ibid.)

Franzen is clearly one of those “who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control.” But it is a love sealed not only by the systematic processes of revising, editing, and proofreading but also by the dignified permanence that is justified by these processes. In short, a text produced by care and thus worthy to be set in print is the preferred kind, one that is capable of communicating “individual to individual.” The fact that Franzen discerns some manner of human subjectivity in the unchanging, fixed presence of the printed volume, the fact that he regards the permanence of the book as the precondition for an “in depth” communication, directly contradicts the “metaphysics of presence” that Jacques Derrida famously locates at the core of the West’s logocentric, philosophical tradition. The conventional argument, explicitly formulated by the Ancient Greek sophists and upheld across millennia, is that logos, as living speech, exhibits the “vigor, richness, agility and flexibility” that are “limited and constrained by the cadaverous rigidity of the written sign” (Derrida 1981, 114). In this line of thought, the written letter is the dead letter, a corpse whose presence marks the absence of the author and thereby precludes any true conversation. As Socrates makes clear in the Phaedrus, written speeches, like paintings, may appear to be living (hōs zōnta), yet they remain chillingly obstinate when questioned; to each individual inquiry or counterargument, the inscribed text “always declares [sēmainei] one and the same thing” (Phaed. 275d). Derrida elaborates: Writing, in that it repeats itself and remains identical in the type, cannot flex itself in all senses, cannot bend with all the differences among presents, with all the variable, fluid, furtive necessities of psychagogy. He who speaks, in contrast, is not controlled by any preestablished pattern; he is better able to conduct his signs; he is there to accentuate them, inflect them, retain them or set them loose according to the demands of the moment, the nature of the desired effect, the hold he has on the listener. (Derrida 1981, 114)

Yet for Franzen, it is precisely the inflexibility of the printed word that exercises a hold on the reader. The simple fact that the printed book “still says the same

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thing” counts as a reassurance, which provides the prerequisite for thoughtful communication. In this regard, the book is decidedly not a cadaver but rather an incarnate, inspiring being. Mourned absence is supplanted by celebrated Real Presence. Franzen’s oft-stated position—which in part corresponds to his more general distaste for “the infernal machine of technoconsumerism” (Franzen 2013b) yet also appears to be motivated by a sincere passion for the physical book—revises one of the most persistent trends in the history of Western metaphysics. That is to say, Franzen’s bibliophilia would not relegate the written word to the secondary, less valuable status that was definitively established by Aristotle, who taught that “spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of speech” (De interp. 1.16a). It will not oppose the printed text to the living, vocal presence of the author, and thereby depreciate the inscribed signs as the mere “mediation of mediation” or as “a fall into the exteriority of meaning” (Derrida 1997, 13). Rather, for Franzen, the material weight of the printed book, in contrast to the purported immateriality of digital media, adduces a kind of presence that enjoys similar authoritative privileges that are typically ascribed to the living voice. In order to account for the psychological affect that binds people to bound volumes, it is necessary to attend to the precise nature of the metaphors being employed. The book can only come across as a cadaver when it is metaphorically viewed as a body, as a vessel that contains the traces of an eloquent spirit or soul no longer present. The operative premise is that this ideational content is completely separable from its corporeal form, rigorously distinguished from its concrete manifestation. Meaning may be housed within the confines of the book, it may subsist within the limits of the physical corpus, but it is always capable of release or even redemption, precisely because it is distinct from its material vehicle. Based on the separateness of the soul and the body, the book’s meaning can readily be detached from its perishable container, liberated from its finite or contingent conditions and incorporated into the reader’s consciousness. Yet, as many of the comments above demonstrate, books are not exclusively reducible to a merely instrumental function. A book may be regarded as a body, but that does not mean it is only a vessel of transport. To think of the body beyond its vehicular status is to recall the flesh that constitutes the corpus.7 The flesh exceeds the boundaries of the body, and therefore resists full absorption into the body. It transgresses corporeal limitations, forestalling incorporation into some meaningful or utilitarian system. For this reason the flesh is frequently linked to the sin of lust or luxuria. Construed as flesh, the book effectively denies

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the separateness of logos and its physical form. Here, meaning is not merely a detachable kernel of sense embodied within the book’s binding but rather a nondetachable presence incarnate in the very page. For readers of the flesh—for those who clutch on to whatever is perceived as de luxe—the book’s materiality matters. Accordingly, in the Third Part of his magnum opus, Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer appeals to the Christian formulation of the “word made flesh” in order to delineate two qualitatively different understandings of language: namely, between a “Greek” conception of language, exemplified by Platonism, which rigorously separates thinking and its linguistic expression; and a “Western” or “Christian” alternative, grounded in a Hebrew tradition and subsequently elaborated by Augustine, which does not distinguish between an idea and the words that formulate it. Whereas Plato regards dianoia as a purely wordless thought that exists apart from and prior to the language that subsequently communicates it, Augustine locates the verbum at the very origin of thinking: there is no thought that is not always already verbal. In principio erat Verbum—“In the beginning was the Word.” For Gadamer, the importance of the Prologue to the Gospel of John ought to be as obvious as the difference between Christian and Greek theologies: “Inkarnation ist offenbar nicht Einkörperung”—“Incarnation is evidently not embodiment” (Gadamer 1990, 422). As Gadamer points out, when a Greek god appears on earth, he or she simply assumes a human form, embodying it while preserving a superhuman nature. For example, in Book One of the Odyssey, when Athena assumes the body of the old sea-captain Mentēs to communicate safely with Telemachus, she never once surrenders or compromises her divinity. She remains a goddess, possessing a human form, which is discontinuous with her divine nature. In stark contrast, according to the Christian doctrine of incarnation, God does become mortal. Whereas Athena can dispense with the bodily form of Mentēs after she has accomplished her mission, Christ’s entire ministry on earth, straight through to the Crucifixion, cannot be divorced from his fleshy existence. In Gadamer’s view, this “evident” (offenbar) distinction constitutes a “revelation” (Offenbarung), one that, regardless of its theological validity, can teach us something crucial about how words and language work. If the book as body presents us with a method, the book as flesh presents us with an event. While the doctrine of embodiment stabilizes the autonomy of being and thereby reinforces the rigorous distinction between form and content, subject and object, constituting intellect and constituted thought, while

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it allows the mind to read through and ultimately discard the material vehicle in favor of the immaterial tenor, the doctrine of incarnation is concerned with the indispensable, with the singular coordination of subject and object, with the mutual belonging of idea and experience. Readers may find themselves split between these two premises, between the need for corporeal signification and the desire for flesh. Reading for transmitted meaning does not preclude some notion that views literature as a physical manifestation linked to incarnate existence, to the lives of authors and readers. Printed books have long cultivated practices that encourage the belief in the writer’s presence. Publishers often explicitly promote the conviction that the writers persist in the writing despite their own physical absence. Authors’ photographs on the dustcover contribute to this illusion; and the author’s personal inscription to the book’s recipient provides an even greater reinforcement of some notion of singularity. Accordingly, autograph manuscripts by famous authors are highly coveted and fetch exorbitant prices at auction houses. Certainly, digitization likewise strives to animate the letter by including vivid illustrations, interactive links, multiple hypertexts, and touchscreen technology. These sensual gestures arguably aim to compensate for a loss of flesh and can therefore be regarded as vestigial practices that reach back to the era before Gutenberg. Every medieval manuscript differs vastly from the other, even if they contain the selfsame text. Here, individuality is further highlighted by the text’s material support, the parchment prepared from animal skin. As Laura Kendrick remarks, “We can feel with our fingertips the difference between flesh side and hair side of the leather page; we can see and touch the pores and sometimes old scars; we can even smell the parchment. . . . Getting to know a particular manuscript is like getting to know a particular person” (Kendrick 1999, 12–13). Medieval book production may still furnish the paradigmatic case for the philology of the flesh, which is profoundly grounded in doctrines of divine incarnation. The founding miracle is nearly ritually recreated every time someone handled a book produced from vellum, parchment, and leather—that is, from animal flesh that has been scraped, cleaned, tanned, and polished. Sarah Kay insists upon this material fact: While today we may think of books as inorganic commodities—or even as virtual, electronic ones—the whole of medieval book production operates using what were once living things. The act of writing comprises the touch of human skin on animal skin, goose feather pen in hand, oak gall ink in a horn inkwell

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Book Presence in a Digital Age close by; and reading involves renewing this contact of skin on skin, as the feather’s traces are deciphered. (Kay 2011, 13; cf. Holsinger 2009)

The religiously institutional act of the divine Word taking on flesh is underscored by the display of text-bearing flesh. Consequently, a specific relation obtains between the initiating miracle of incarnation and the carnal properties of the book. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian metaphors have informed the ways a physical text was approached; and these metaphors, I would argue, are still operative in our own, contemporary attachment to the printed and bound text. There would appear to be this theological notion—however secularized— that still touches on our human desire to touch. Perhaps it would not be too far to suggest that today’s touchscreen technology, including recent e-literary innovations like the touchscreen-based novella, Pry (2015), by Tender Claws (Danny Cannizzaro and Samantha Gorman), speaks to some innate human need to handle and manipulate the texts that engage us, to override the spectator’s distance that would otherwise leave the reader screened out. To adopt the language of phenomenology, in particular that of MerleauPonty, touching grounds a mode of being-in-the-world that negotiates the gap between the viewing subject and the viewed object. In Merleau-Ponty’s late writings, this mode was specifically and consistently linked to the flesh, as that which is primordial, prior to subjectification and objectification, contrary to any system of representation (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 142). The flesh constitutes a prereflective interaction with the environment, which should be contrasted with the objectifying processes of pure cognition. The delusion of intellectualism is that the world can be divided into bodies of knowledge, that the mind can possess ideas on the world as opposed to forming ideas in the world (see Jay 1994, 301–07). As the body’s membrane, the skin fails to coincide with the body; as a liminal zone, it exceeds corporeal boundaries that contribute to objective identity and integrity. Merleau-Ponty provides a most concise formulation: “The flesh of my body is shared by the world” (1968, 248). When regarded as an entirely disincarnate text, the digital book offers highly accessible bodies of information that can be scanned and skimmed, cut and pasted, downloaded and attached. The technology responds to a broad range of desires and answers any number of wishes: the world sits on the subject’s lap, nurturing the mind’s belief in its invulnerable, untouchable autonomy. In contrast, the metaphor of the incarnation invites a consideration of the reading experience that differs from conventional acts of semantic interpretation, appropriative reading, and cognitive incorporation. By distinguishing the

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body from the flesh, one arrives at two fundamentally different approaches to the published word: on the one hand, an approach that handles the book as a corporeal object containing a meaningful soul within; and on the other hand, an approach that refuses to tear meaning apart from its mediating form. The affective attachment to the enduring presence of the book would appear to be an attachment to the flesh of the printed word, an attachment that protests digitization as a procedure designed for transforming the flesh into a body— as a discarnation that reduces publications to one general function, namely, transmitting a detachable meaning. The protests voiced above consistently reject the dispensability of the material book and instead adhere to the flesh, to the flesh’s recalcitrance.8 Yet, the ebullient proponents of innovative media also indulge in religious tonalities. They remind us that, in moving to the digitized screen, we regard a paperless but still paper-like phenomenon, a chartaceous memorial of what is no longer at hand. The text’s ascension to this etherealized or spiritualized space leaves behind a spectral reminder of the pagina abscondita, a discarnate image offered and received in memory of the physically departed codex, a token of a communal farewell to the word that was once flesh. The high priests of progress attempt to assuage all fear of loss by underscoring the glorious attainments and liberating promise of technological advancement. What has been subtracted from the reading experience, this vaguely felt ellipsis of the flesh, is replenished by celebrated accounts of compensation. Undeniably, the purported marginalization of the physical book has made room for a steady influx of gifts that cannot be disdained. Obstacles have been removed. Space has been cleared. Hence, the good news is preached with the fervency of the converted, a secular gospel peddled by inspired and enlightened technophiles. According to these officiating guides, the ellipses perceived by the obstinate devotees of print are restocked by all the parentheses introduced by the digital prophets. Even if the word once became flesh, the flesh invariably becomes word.

Notes 1 For an insightful and particularly judicious discussion, see the chapter, “Codex in Crisis: The Book Dematerializes,” in Grafton (2009, 288–324). 2 For an overview of the various tensions and interactions between print and electronic media, see Brillenburg Wurth (2012, 1–23).

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3 On the manifold relationship between cybernetics and the idea of the book, see Sussman (2011). 4 For some typical accounts, see Young (2007) and Piper (2012). 5 The passage is from Karl Kraus’s 1910 vitriolic essay, “Heine und die Folgen” (Heine and the Consequences), in Franzen (2013a, 10–11). 6 The comment is from a speech Franzen gave at the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia, as reported in Singh (2012). 7 I fully explore this theme and its limits in my forthcoming book, Philology of the Flesh. 8 This carnal longing may perhaps be tied to the multiple fears of and disappointments with disembodied data, as recently expressed by Matthew Kirschenbaum (2012), N. Katherine Hayles (2012), Wendy Chun (2016), and others.

Works cited Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene, ed. 2012. Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature through Cinema and Cyberspace. New York: Fordham University Press. Cannizzaro, Danny and Samantha Gorman. 2015. PRY. V. 2.0. Tender Claws LLC. iOS 6.0 or later. http://prynovella.com. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2016. “Big Data as Drama.” ELH 83 (2): 363–82. doi:10.1353/ elh.2016.0011 DeLillo, Don. 1991. Mao II. New York: Viking Penguin. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Corrected edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ehrenreich, Ben. 2011. “The Death of the Book.” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 18. http://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-death-of-the-book/ Franzen, Jonathan. 2013a. The Kraus Project. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Franzen, Jonathan. 2013b. “What’s Wrong with the Modern World.” The Guardian, September 13. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/13/jonathan-franzenwrong-modern-world (page has been removed; archived at web.archive.org) Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1990 (1960). Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen: Mohr. Grafton, Anthony. 2009. Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holsinger, Bruce. 2009. “Of Pigs and Parchment: Medieval Studies and the Coming of the Animal.” PMLA 124 (2): 616–23. doi:10.1632/pmla.2009.124.2.616

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Hughes, Michael M. 2010. “On ‘Book Smell’ and Other Arguments against E-Readers.” July 29. http://michaelmhughes.com/on-book-smell-and-other-arguments-againste-readers Jay, Martin. 1994. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley : University of California Press. Kay, Sarah. 2011. “Legible Skins: Animals and the Ethics of Medieval Reading.” Postmedieval 2 (1): 13–32. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.48 Kendrick, Laura. 1999. Animating the Letter: The Figurative Embodiment of Writing from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2012. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Klinkenborg, Verlyn. 2013. “Books to Have and to Hold.” New York Times, August 11. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/opinion/sunday/books-to-have-and-to-hold. html Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Invisible and the Visible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Piper, Andrew. 2012. Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Samson, Ian. 2012. Paper: An Elegy. London: Fourth Estate. Singh, Anita. 2012. “Jonathan Franzen: E-Books Are Damaging Society.” The Telegraph, January 29. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9047981/JonathanFranzen-e-books-are-damaging-society.html Sussman, Henry. 2011. Around the Book: Systems and Literacy. New York: Fordham University Press. Updike, John. 2006. “The End of Authorship.” New York Times, June 25. http://www. nytimes.com/2006/06/25/books/review/25updike.html Young, Sherman. 2007. The Book Is Dead. Long Live the Book. Sydney : University of New South Wales Press.

3

From Codex to Codecs Garrett Stewart

Book presence in a digital age? Posited—and so posed—as a question, and if we mean by book the traditional codex, one answer has to be “vestigial.” For the premise of our considerations in this particular book could readily be restated as “book’s aging in a digital present.” Any attention to the matter must begin with the bound volume’s exponential obsolescence as cultural instrument and icon. Bookstores still exist, of course, and the books they shelve and market, but the predominant storage of words (and photos) has gone elsewhere. And the difference between writing and reading has narrowed in the process. A “senior” scholar begins an essay like this in a manner unrecognizable to his younger self. I’m gently queried by an advance editing device—avant la lettre, so to say, of press publication—that automatically checks (in both senses) my initial freedoms and accidents of phrasing. This happens in a prose “marked up,” before any printed marks hit paper, by a spell-check function inherent to the wordprocessing program wired to my screen. Not recognizing the larger context of the alluded-to rubric of this book, an older version of Word I’ve used at home rather than in the office, warns me in serpentine green that my opening question has no verb, nothing to pin it down to a temporal frame, no copula to situate its tense. If that is part of my point—in an indeterminate and escalating digital present that is all-subsuming—I have to ignore the greenlining and move on. And what I will come to, eventually, is the conceptual book art that has risen to address the partial eclipse of the normative book—its profoundly residual status—with something like a new and textually “demediated” version of Kant’s purposiveness without purpose: this in works I have previously called bibliobjets. It was good to see the corrugated underscore on that coinage too, the program being at least as vigilant about lexicon as about syntax. But putting aside inbuilt editing systems (and the print destiny of any writing), the long reach of the book form, or at least its formatting—say its

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codextension into electronic practice—is, at the most obvious level, the work of the skewomorph. Even if that last word had been properly spelled, Microsoft’s spellchecking (or its now-allowed one-word “spellchecking”) hasn’t caught up with it. The “skewing” of platforms is not the true etymology of the properly spelled skeuomorph, which derives from the Greek for “tool use.” Use—and reuse: indeed, symbolic recycling. In its specific technological application in the language of industrial design, however, skeuomorphism names the refunctioning of new technology by what we might well call “optical allusion” to the old, everything from the faux wooden siding on a so-called “station wagon” to the simulated gas-pump nozzle for the recharging of electric cars. When it is not just a decorative “touch” detached from tool application, as in chandelier lightbulbs shaped like candle flames, the skeuomorph more actively familiarizes by atavism: a throwback to help consumers forward. It is a ubiquitous device in post-book screen culture, in everything from “paging” and “scrolling” to the inert play “button” that is merely clicked on rather than depressed. The skeuomorph is the engineering equivalent of the more strictly “design” trend that Pressman (2009) has included in recent lectures under the category of “bookishness,” as in the marketing of a laptop case with the soft-sided shape of a leather-bound antique folio (with zipper!).1 In such design ideas, though often in a merely tongue-in-cheek gesture, a major advance in “digital” convenience like portable computerization helps clear the cultural stage for itself by pretending to cling to a former “tool use,” just as we are urged to “Look Inside” a now-rotated three-dimensional “volume” on Amazon that is really only a flat-screen image— or invited to select a Kindle title from a pictured wooden bookshelf. Innovation is licensed and acclimated by continuity, rather than rupture. Often, yes, the effect is more gimmicky than in any way elegiac. Conceptual artifacts of book sculpture, by contrast, tend to turn the “conservative” (preservative, residual) cast of “bookish” imagery inside out, or upside down, by outmoding the object before our eyes, rather than upgrading its functions by various graphic ingratiations of screen format. Such aggressive gestures include, to name but two, the appropriated hardbound novels “burned through” line by line in Ann Hamilton’s famous performance piece tropos (1993–94) or, two decades later, the evanescent book printed by the small Argentine publisher under that house’s ironic imprimatur Eterna Cadencia. Here is a volume that arrives safely wrapped in plastic, but whose invisible printer’s ink, once exposed to the air breathed by its reader (or not), disappears completely in two months. Called El Libro que No Puede Esperar (2012), its

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actual cover reads as if its text were already on the way out: E LIBR QU NO PU DE ESPER R. In English: TH BO K THAT C N’T WA T. The marketing gimmick in this case, in an age of uphill bookselling, is also, of course, an allegory in an apocalyptic key: the codex format, all told, playing a metatextual waiting game with what one may fear to be the numbered days of its own cultural shelf life. Another mode of art production in the bibliocentric vein—a conceptual mode that may be contrasted to commercial “bookishness” as a retro fad, its objets not manifested as commodities but analyzed in installation practice—is the punningly titled The Reading Room (2001) by conceptual and electronic poet John Cayley. In the absence of living book users, LED “reading lamps” do all the reading there is by leaning into—in various anthropomorphic twists of spine— various plastic-sheathed poetic texts on several lecterns, which reflect from their manifold rectangular surfaces onto the wall of the installation in overlapped page-like patterns so evocative that, given a soundtrack of poetic enunciations from an uncertain source, it is as if the room itself, as well as each instrument of illumination within it, were doing its own decoding of text. In the nearly infinite “space” afforded by the writing machine at which I am presently at work, it is tempting to divide up the vast matters in play here, pieced together from draft “files,” into virtual chapters all their own—make that whole compressed volumes, four in all—as part of an unwritten cultural history that can merely be glanced at in a single essay.2 It is a history, of course, that carries us past exactly those bound volumes in which such accounts used exclusively to be housed. Whole books-in-progress are now stored in laptop “folders”—another skeuomorph of a particularly figurative sort, with neither material form nor palpable spatial expansion to its name. A revised scalar imagination is certainly part of what we must bring to any question of “book presence in the digital age.”

Volume 1: Reading time If you habitually use your laptop for reading or writing without taping over your webcam lens, you may (tech rumor has it) be caught in random sampling by that very optical affordance. And even if you’re not overseen when reading in your so-called Nook, your preferences can be invisibly noted, both by initial download and by your marginal flaggings or highlights. Such is the difference between an interpellating cultural (and even sometimes literally visual) panopticon and the new order of dataveillance dubbed by a legal scholar the cryptopticon, in which

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a process we might term datanalysis supersedes any optical model of oversight in the machinations of control (cf. Vaidhyanathan 2015). This millennial shift in the media of reading bears mapping against the tripartite division in Régis Debray’s synoptic essay “The Three Ages of Looking” (1995) where, according to his venture in “mediology,” the Logosphere of the Word extended from the invention of writing until the invention of printing, linked under theocentric sanction to the Age of the (timeless) “Idol,” or transcendental icon. This epoch was succeeded by the Graphosphere, the Age of Art, and in turn, after early TV, by the Videosphere in our era, the Age of the Image. Though unmentioned by Debray, writing in 1992, this last phase is an image regime that closes a circle by subsuming, under digitization, even writing itself to pixel imaging, let alone other graphic and pictorial representations: defying time not by a valorized eternity of content, as in the Logosphere, but by a monetized instantaneity of transmit. Long before this leveling confluence—in what is lately called “convergent” mediation—there was another moment of dovetailed regimes when the sacred valence of the Logosphere overlapped the Graphosphere in the rendered reading of the Word, upper- on the way to lowercase. This is a dominant topos of sacred painting after breaking from the reign of the Idol—as well as a prominent scenario in secular “realism” all the way through to Cubist modernism. It persisted, through Picasso and Matisse, and in its later contortions by Francis Bacon, down to the moment in postwar art when, after the sidelining of figure painting altogether and the quasi-idolatrous treatment of Abstraction by critics like Clement Greenberg, suddenly Conceptual art started to put words alone on canvas: as in the punning 1967 send-up titled Abstract Art No. 8 by Michael Baldwin, from the British school of Art & Language, that merely silk-screens onto the privileged canvas surface of canonical painting the paragraph-long abstract of a book from a philosophical journal. Or, from across the Atlantic in the American flank of the Conceptual art movement, take another punning exercise in this vein from L.A.-based Allen Ruppersberg: his transmedial textwork of process art entitled The Picture of Dorian Gray (1974). From the artist whose earlier work had annotated “Reading Time” in hours and minutes under pencil replicas of famous book covers, and based this time on the eponymous ekphrastic novel by Oscar Wilde about a magic portrait that itself changes over time while its model is freed from aging, we encounter a full-length canvas avatar of the said Picture—fourteen canvases strong, in fact. It is a serial work that puts viewers/ readers themselves through its own kind of aging process (as suggested in its

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recent display at MOMA) whenever (if ever) they take the time to decipher the lines of indelible black marking pen that have transcribed every word of Wilde’s parable of defied time in so-called longhand. In this transmedial appropriation of bookhood, such a conceptually dismembered and respatialized codex—a novel turned triple triptych, and then some—has put time, anomalously enough (but for conceptualism quintessentially), on the side of canvas art. Centuries before Baldwin or Ruppersberg, before either of such antimodernist inversions, figure painting had, nonetheless, its own way of refiguring time by spatial design. Among other topoi, such painting often involved the graphic delineation of bodies leaning into scribed or printed words in a sacred codex, where the time of a spectator’s looking might be said to sample, by osmosis, the rendered time of spiritual meditation. Many canonical works attest to this, and not least the numerous St. Jeromes reading in the desert—or in one canonical instance turning that space of “study” into an architectonic locus, Antonello de Messina’s St. Jerome in his Study (completed no later than 1475), to whose contemporary simulation we now move.

Volume 2: Immersive reading and depth perception In 2015 at the National Gallery, in a show called Soundscapes, various conceptual musicians and sound artists were asked to accompany a chosen masterpiece from the collection: to “audialize” it in some inventive way. The celebrated Canadian duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, influential manipulators of ambient sound, chose to “translate” none other than Antonello’s St. Jerome in his Study into a meticulous 3-D model at the same scale as the painting, complete with a fully horizoned backdrop of earth, sky, and clouds of the sort only glimpsed through the sightlines of the diptych windows that repeat Jerome’s open bible behind and above him. Yet in their rethought study (both senses yet again), there is no Jerome. The space of the replica is instead filled with the sounds of medieval life—natural and human, including birdsong, muffled voices, and wagon rumblings, that might have distracted the saint from his transcendental labors—might have, that is, if a replica of Jerome were anywhere in the 3-D projection of his library, his “oratory.” Instead, his focalizing consciousness (and responsive silent voicing) is entirely gone from the scene. The book remains open on his lectern, miniature and unreadable still, while his reading chair is angled slightly outward and unoccupied, as if he has just left. The space Cardiff

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and Miller have thus reconstructed and extrapolated from is no longer a scene of reading, with the voice in tacit activation (in a silence continuous with all painting), but, rather, the picture of a silent book in a busy and impinging world of other than phonetic sounds. In fulfilling the fantasy of three-dimensionality in response to perspective painting, and in adding auditory time into the resulting spatial “inflation,” this riff on Antonella robs the work of its own sponsoring genre in the audiovisual process. Depth can come at less exorbitant costs in regard to the image of reading. A year later at the Tate rather than the National Gallery, by one of the earliest woman photographers, Lady Clementina Hawarden, we see, from 1861, a picture of two women flanking a fireplace in a domestic setting, an image of course all but twinned to produce the differentials of a stereo gestalt. One woman is “lost in her book,” one comparably “absorbed” in her needlework—to use, in the latter case, Michael Fried’s influential term for nontheatrical compositions uninterested in actively soliciting the viewer. In 3-D technologies, then as now, the method is its own histrionic hook, requiring no further rhetoric of recorded gesture or gaze—and sometimes situated in contrast to lesser fields of representation. In the Hawarden stereograph, behind and above the women, several photographs are hung framed on the wall, registered of course—in a strict two-dimensional fashion—as ground to the figure of depth effected by the stereo view-finder. Into this dialectic of depth and surface, staged to the brandished advantage of the present higher-tech representation, the book being read on the left is an intermediary emblem, carrying in imagination the reading eye, as a book always does, from its 2-D rectangles, page after page, into the depth of another phenomenological dimensionality. It is a long technological leap from this photographic (or equivalent painterly) emplacement of the book—within an amplified deep space that reading occupies, reconstellates, and tacitly engenders in its own right—to, just over a centuryand-a-half later, the digital pop-up book, read only by webcam, designed in 2013 by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse under the title Between Page and Screen. Here, the handheld vestigial codex is only the platform for a stylish barcode submitted to recognition by today’s more typical reading machine—but, this time, with the computer operating from the inside out to mediate a book form in transmission to electronic type, with its own “stereo” overlay of the reader’s face on the rotating virtual planarity of text mobilized on screen.3 The results of this forced marriage between codex and whatever codec (portmanteau conflation of coder-decoder) is used to “read” the embedded algorithms into screen presence

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situate the “between” of this artifact on a wide historical spectrum bound, on one end, by preprint holograph (handwriting) and, on the other, by the cybernetic hologram—a long leap, and not just technological but aesthetic. Even political, as we’ll see—since ceding to the commuter the right to do our reading for us, even when only a trope for ingenious interactivity, has consequences not soon bottled up. A transhistorical leap, to be sure, is needed to move from one end of this spectrum to the other, and yet the intervening terrain has been variously occupied as well—and rigorously thought (as well as passed) through. In just this respect, only a long vestibule away at the Tate from that stereocard in the “Painting with Light” exposition, was an extensive retrospective on “Conceptual Art in Britain, 1964–1979,” including not only Baldwin’s Abstract Art No. 8, but a special showing of John Latham’s Encyclopedia Britannica 1971, for which he had filmed each page for projection at 24 per second. Michel Butor once famously said that the one thing books have in common with paintings as representational systems is that all books are diptychs (Butor 1968, 55). Painters have certainly always known this in their embedded illegible impressionism of facing pages. But what books have in common with film is the single rectangular increment of the page “frame,” summarily betrayed when (as opposed to the normal work of cinematic projection) its motion is not left to the voluntary eye but instead mechanically induced.

Volume 3: Pages turned—or detourned A transitional work between Latham’s travesty of reading time and our current reading machines (another overlap within Debray’s categories, this time between the Graphosphere and the Videosphere) appeared in a recent show at the Yale Art Gallery, called “Odd Volumes,” curated by book sculptor Doug Beube. This was a 1997 piece by John Roach, called Pageturner, that played in a doubly prescient way between the exacerbation of electronics in surveillance technology and a fading culture of the codex—and this exactly a decade before the launch of the Kindle “reader” (the noun once personal, now mechanical). It is just the distance between human agent and the book instrument that is exaggerated and disabled by Roach’s work. A distance not just closed—but closed out—on approach. An electronic sensor spots any viewer (and potential reader) in her coming near to an open suitcase, as if a variant of some Fluxus assemblage, containing in this case a book

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whose pages are turned arbitrarily by four small electric fans. This mechanical rendering-illegible of any textual continuity is transmitted by videocam to a blurry TV image that makes the pages hard to discern even before their being swept past by air currents having nothing to do with the breath of phonetic enunciation. Not only a lampoon of “reading machines,” this assemblage is a parody of the “audiobook” as well, accompanied by a small monaural speaker that projects out from the image only the murmuring whoosh of the fan blades, no articulated text. When the well-chosen book thus denatured is the obsessively phonetic prose and poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, this euphonic loss seems all the more foregrounded by Roach. Not only does this alienated book encounter look back to Latham’s pre-digital irony of auto-reading the Britannica, but it looks forward to the voluntarily recalibrated settings of the speed-reading technology known as Spritz (its tagline “Reading Reimagined”). This is an Android app that flashes one word after another past the reader at what is known as its ORP, its Optimal Recognition Point, graphic not phonetic: a technique explicitly designed and advertised to impede all “subvocalization” and thus to speed cognition in an override of phonetic production. Everything the viewer was invited to imagine in the body of the reader leaning over her page in the history of art, the phonic intensification of that body as well as its projection outward into imaginative space, is reduced here to the treadmill of paralinguistic efficiency. What was a cognitive joke in Latham’s Britannica is now an electronic exercise machine. In the long legacy of such conceptual bookworks, the manipulations of print, page, and codex formats—whether in the piling or carving of found books, or in the sculpting of their simulacra—tend to avoid anything like sentimental elegy or nostalgia without repressing history: the history of the book form’s own statistical supersession as dominant data hoard. With such work arisen increasingly in the age of digital reading, and now so-called digital printing, one waits for the closing of the loop in some artist’s ironic 3-D computer generation of an ersatz antique volume in polymer buildup. The computer technology whose font arrays have long constituted textual “pages” at both ends of the production spectrum, for writers and readers alike, could also now spew out a credibly simulated bound volume in a plastic slipcase all on its own. Though this fantasized, along with many an actual, bookwork could be temptingly “read,” at least in some degree, as an act of mourning for the hegemony of the codex, one may wish to say, rather, that—in self-conscious irony—such potentially therapeutic mourning takes the perverse form of melancholia instead, where the “lost object” is resented in its surrender to death, abused, and all but suicidally

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internalized as a deadness within. In any case, the mortality of the codex is never far from mind in all those bookworks carved out of impenetrable wood, of perishable ice, of mock-biblical stone tablets, or, most recently, in a new cult of mummification, buried in its actual paperback manifestation under a vitrine on a bed of preservative salt crystals.4 Books embalm ideas to be rejuvenated later—or say thawed out from the cryogenic deep freeze of algorithmic preservation. The irony of Latham’s encyclopedic implosion was that, even in retrieval, it reduced the “world book” to a mere slurred picture, not just in parody of its overwhelming compendium but in another anti-Greenbergian irony that suggests the massing of an illegible background of axiomatic discourse behind every aesthetic blur—or, in Latham’s high-speed case, any gray-scale (and flickering) monochrome. We might say that Latham turns the encyclopedia into cinema as a new kind of veil painting, stressing how pointless it is as mere (pure) image. In this respect, certainly, he was part of the shift from “presence” to “process” that is the emphasized theme of that retrospective Tate exhibition on Conceptual art: a deliberate veering from the formal immanence of an introvert modernism to time-based experience, in which light, again, Ruppersberg’s many-canvased Picture of Dorian Gray is an especially lucid transatlantic counterpart. Again, too, there is an odd digital prescience involved in all such temporalization of legible or visible presence. For time, lately, has scarcely been, in the idiomatic sense, on the side of the traditional book—the engines of instantaneity, instead, having toppled its sovereignty as storage function. Varying Einstein’s quip about time as an artificial structure that keeps everything from happening at once, we might well add that pagination, let alone syntax, keeps all meaning from the scourge of simultaneity. Latham’s irony is to foreground this by dysfunction, by negation. The disabled eye in such a work finds its equivalent in conceptual pieces that frustrate the otherness of intake with the recursion of self. Long before the latest technological conflation of “texting” and “the selfie,” where selfexpression and self-imaging converge, the Tate exhibition includes an explicit critique of Greenberg’s reflexive modernism in a work of satiric “reflection” by Michael Baldwin (1966–1967), again from the Art & Language collective. Mocking the fetishized monochrome flatness of the painting (noun) as sheer canvas painting (gerund) in Greenberg, Baldwin teases the eye with unwanted “depth.” This is accomplished by an anti-modernist diatribe typed out, and thus impressed into low relief, on a highly reflective “mirralon” sheet, a process

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that makes it almost impossible to read: to read the difference, that is, between discourse and image. Under the congested and contradictory generic title Drawing (Typed Mirror), process is sardonically impeded in the name of its own testing claims. Mirror works in a sense read us, not just our faces but our roving expectations. Another such work in the same show, also by Baldwin, entails a mirror clipped over a canvas under the title Untitled Painting (1965), fitly so—since it entitles us only to an unspecified view of any painting it happens to reflect from our shifting perspective. Such works also, of course, situate our own bodies on momentary self-display. In this sense you might say that they parade, if not invade, the privacy of our own supposedly impersonal viewing of any art display. Conceptual book art has its comparable ironies, as, for instance, with the two glass eyeballs staring out at us from the facing (face-giving) pages of an altered eighteenth-century volume by German artist Hubertus Gojowczyk (1999). That sense of being spied on in what one eyes impersonally offers something like an inverted lampoon of reading’s received understanding. In one of the most influential pronouncements on the phenomenology of reading in the annals of literary theory, Georges Poulet once said that, in the act of deciphering a text, “I am the subject of thoughts other than my own” (Poulet 1968, 56). It is as if I am the generator rather than the recipient of the discourse. In that as-if is something like a gestalt switch between book as window and book as mirror, both operating to open the circuits of comprehension. In this vein, from the pre-Conceptual moment of the German Zero school in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as recently surveyed in a full Guggenheim retrospective, one finds another watershed work, Mirror Shard Book (Spiegelscherbenbuch), 1962, appearing two years before the inaugural date of the Tate show’s time span and its own mirror works from later in the decade. This piece of what we might call neo-Cubist bricolage by Christian Megert, binding transparent glass shards together with jagged mirrored “pages,” is a work of fragmented optic surfaces irregularly fanned out in splayed codex fashion, its materiality suggesting the variable gestalt between access and reflex that reading constitutes. But recent developments in “affective” computerization have taken the idea of the mirroring text a perverse and unforeseen step further. Face-recognition software has become sophisticated enough to read the squint of an eye or the clench of a jaw, the wrinkled brow, what have you, for their emotional signals. It is a kind of new, real-time, and flexible phrenology, and it has been applied to an all-purpose book slipcase with keyless electronic lock that allows potential

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readers access only when their affect is so neutralized—neither resistant nor falsely expectant—that the text can be sure of being received, as it were, objectively (Bereznak 2015). The brainchild of Dutch designer Thijs Biersteker— and involving a book filled with already award-winning content about which, supposedly, no further judgment is to be applied—this pre-policing text hails from 2015, the same year in which the New Yorker ran an article on “affective” computerization where the idea of embedding tiny hi-definition cameras in movie screens to “read” audience reaction—giving, as it were, new meaning to the “focus group”—was among this new technology’s leading potential applications. In the case of Biersteker’s fortified or “gated” book, however, the right to look is “screened” in advance (Khatchadourian 2015).

Volume 4: Book/s reading Many actual (rather than just probable) bibliobjets serve to objectify the form of bookhood in the gutting of its utility, and with whatever degree of implied recoil from the increasing pressures of the digital in the dematerialization of the codex. Granted, this is a system so deep-going in our culture as to be in some sense invisible. Certain artists are there to recall our attention to it, whether in anatomy or elegy—as, for instance, in a piece by prolific bookworker Fiona Banner that prints a blank book with only three personifying tropes, “Face,” “Spine,” and “Back,” on its respective cover surfaces, or another by Banner that embosses the words “No Image Available” (in a kind of reverse skeuomorph) on the cover of a bound hardback (in parody of such website apologias). In the wide variety of such practice, the objecthood of the codex, as part of its implicit bookhood, is under study even when undermined—and its pages as well. An instinct persists to address the iconology of the book, as cultural repository, with the whole mix of nostalgia and allergy its fading hegemony may invite in the rearview mirror, even when only implicit, of digital dominance. Other ironies impinge as well, so we’ve seen. A surveillance sensor that answers our approach with a reading not synchronized to human perceptual need (in Roach’s mockingly robotized Pageturner), plus an adjacent video camera that could easily be trained on the frustrated reader rather than the book, are effects that, two decades back, eerily prognosticate that electronic book locked from the get-go if our image is amiss. In reading, “I am the subject of thoughts other than my own.” Those were the old days, where the reader was

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the only activating agent of a waiting text. Now books can insist on having my thoughts even before I have access to theirs. But facial-recognition software is only the extreme case of a mercantile norm, including a whole panoply of user-analysis, from highlighting in Kindle to “will also like” data profiles and pop-ups. Digitization is a new form of monetization, to be sure, but, more importantly, it induces a new register of dematerialization—by contrast not just to codex engineering but to the very imageering of word forms in print culture, now codec-driven at every stage of the process. But the process itself may be left entirely in the dust, and not the dust of crumbling folios in storage libraries either. At this present writing, a report has just come out on a new use of paper not as scribal surface but as wired antenna. A research collaboration between technicians at Disney and digital labs at the University of Washington has devised a web-legible radio-frequency transmitter that can be taped to the surface of an ordinary paper sheet to make it computer interactive (Lerman 2016). Simply moving the onetime “page” can instruct the dials on a computer-activated audio system, for instance, or waving it one way or another can be part of a tabulated ballot in a classroom situation. The odd myth explicitly enshrined here by the technicians—of paper as still the handiest of student (or human) tools, the blank page rather than the blank screen—is like a wholesale skeuomorph in its own right, naturalizing computer “messaging” with its predecessor surface. The result is to rematerialize the network itself at some fantasy level—as the channel of an actually palpable transaction. Without irony, here is the latest artificial vestige of page-based communication, even as the page is reduced to a mere gesture of connectivity without any writing on it. But irony, of course, has been precisely our conceptualist focus. Compacting any number of such orphaned and forlorn paper sheets— though without any repurposed functionality, and so steeped in their own outmoding as bound pages rather than resuscitated for residual use value—is the first material reduction enacted by many conceptual bookworks. These are works whose volumetric unreadability is itself their meaning, in one tropological form or another. They are, as I began by anticipating, like totalized but failed skeuomorphs: inert introversions of refused upgrade, dead ends rather than reroutings. They stand firm in the illegibility of their own obsolescence, introjecting the lost codex object in the very form of its disablement, turning locally prevented book-reading to an emblem of its own technological eclipse.

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But other books still get made, real ones, books in three dimensions, not just e-books reduced by new technology to the flatness of former painted pages in countless depictions of their reading. And these books have actual pages. And these pages, familiar looks: given face by legible type. Books still get printed, yes, but it is less easy to say that they still get written, rather than input. Anything, therefore, that roughens the surface of keypad-triggered font shapes with the evocation of uneven typewriter impress or mechanical typesetting, let alone scribal irregularity and its own handwritten strokes, has a throwback feel that throws into relief what technology has typically elided in the lost material texture of hand-tooled “writing.” Two last examples, then: the first, as reported by the all but oxymoronically titled Wired Magazine, a dedicated typeface invented for the small-run print venue Sub Rosa. This is an electronically stored font dubbed “Memoire” that, like memory itself, loses its clean edges over textual time, softens and blurs its outline, and in this case blunts its serifs in sixteen barely discernible stages of eroded sharpness across the page spread of the publication.5 Even in the technological rather than biological sphere, then, we may say that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. It does so when capturing in part here, in one single textual sequence, the degradation over time of traditional lead type in a predecessor medium of imprint. We see on a single series of pages, that is, the electronically simulated history of a once mechanical process, making legible a certain declension in the printing press’s own—what—tempography? Conflating process and product, the “Memoire” font-program is itself a work of Conceptual art, introducing timebased transformation into the traditional fixity of impress. Such is the case as well with my second and last example of an instrumental temporality that gets visibly rerun from within the deliberately stop-time mechanics of imprint. So I close with—and in—the “unpredictable and bastardized” font that conceptual book artist Banner (2015) has introduced by a mash-up of several standard typefaces used in her prolific text works. Her jaunty concoction thus operates as a palimpsestic memory of previous print enterprises now entirely facilitated by the digital, so that , in its rough edges and jagged curves, it resembles the kind of faux antique printing effects, as well as other font and page fantasias, that recent commentators see as characterizing a resurgence of reflexive bookhood in the postdigital world of contemporary print publication.6 The particularly truant and obscure Z in Banner’s lowercase italic form—as here: z—

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is only a further reversion, from within print , to the ink flourish of the scribing hand. Yet at the same time, in its salient computer facilitation—and if only under erasure—it is yet another sign that the rule of the codex has been put to sleep zzzzz Getting the computer to recuperate and fuse all previous typeface experiments of single artist—to rewrite, as it were, their very medium—is not just a gesture of Banner’s tireless invention but another latent allegory as well. And it connects back to that software-triggered book lock—with no key, no password, no pin, only a biodynamic analysis of a bluntly psychologized receptivity. As exaggerated to epitome by the facial-recognition hurdle of that subject-detecting closed codex, book presence in the digital age, as we’ve seen, is often the reading by books of our own presence to them: our affect , our preferences, our distractions, the very fit of our moods. It is not as if there were a mirror on such a book’s cover, but rather an infrareading movie camera. And not just there but in far less extreme cases, we are uploaded by what we download. It’s one thing, useful enough, to have your writing policed on screen by redlining or greenlining in the closed circuit of a word-processing application; it’s quite another to have the motives of your networked reading themselves automatically read, sieved and cross-mapped, and submitted to datanalysis. The millennial history of the codex as storage instrument has been overturned in a mere couple of decades, so that the instrument of reading can now store us— even in the very evanescence of our attention span; and even in the iffiness of its own electronic archive, with the variable longevity of its links. If some book forms “Can’t Wait ,” like that importunate Argentine volume, most have overstayed their mass welcome in a surrendered codex hegemony—including in this belatedness even their most inalienable medium. As that wired and “Disneyfied” (rather than inscribed) high-tech paper sheet implies, in its tangible but extraneous cellulose vestige, all ink may be disappearing. Yet your “signature” desires are still to be digitally recognized and logged. Before you realize it , and entirely on the fly, not the book, but rather the e-book, even as its words are zipped past and swept away, is often found reading you.

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Notes 1 Beyond these “throwback” design objects that conjure the outmoded book form by its simulation, for her fuller argument about the impact of the digital on contemporary publication formats, see Pressman (2014), as followed by a more general volume frequently indebted to her terms by Adam Hammond (2016)—and, in between, by the comparable investigations of Alexander Starre (2015), with a specific emphasis on the all but ironic digital provisions of the new print materiality in high-profile fictional typography, from Mark Z. Danielewski to Jonathan Safran Foer. 2 Two books of mine on the aesthetic figuration of books have only begun to broach the issues involved in the parameters of bookhood, or what one might call the depicted codex occasion: The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (2006) and Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (2011). I pursue these and related questions in two subsequent essays: “Between Print Matter and Page Matter: The Codex Platform as Medial Support” and “Visualizing Books, Virtualizing Readers” (Stewart 2015a,b). 3 Here is a work of conceptual interface that arrives on the digital scene, aptly enough, as if named in allusion to the publication, the year before, of Kiene Brillenburg Wurth’s anthology, Between Page and Screen (2012). 4 I refer here to the 2009 display by Stephen Barney, called Ancient Evenings: Ka Libretto, that includes a dissevered copy of Norman Mailer’s novel, Ancient Evenings, as if supine on miniature literary-historical bier (two intact Hemingway titles), with all three texts resting on salt crystals in a ritualized cult of preservation. 5 See Stinson (2016) for a description and a GIF run-through of its serial “degeneration.” 6 See endnote no. 1 above for the convergence of Pressman and Starre on such effects of digital printing.

Works cited Banner, Fiona. 2015. FONT. Typeface. http://www.fionabanner.com/works/Font%20 typeface/Font.zip Bereznak, Alyssa. 2015. “This Book Uses Facial Recognition to Judge Whether You Deserve to Read It.” Yahoo! Tech, February 3. www.yahoo.com/tech/this-book-usesfacial-recognition-to-judge-whether-109975974319.html Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene, ed. 2012. Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature through Cinema and Cyberspace. New York: Fordham University Press. Butor, Michel. 1968. “The Book as Object.” In Inventory: Essays by Michel Butor. Translated by Patricia Dreyfus, edited by Richard Howard, 39–56. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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Debray, Régis. 1995. “The Three Ages of Looking.” Translated by Eric Rauth. Critical Inquiry 21 (3): 529–55. doi:10.1086/448763 Hammond, Adam. 2016. Literature in the Digital Age: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Khatchadourian, Raffi. 2015. “We Know How You Feel.” New Yorker, January 19. http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/know-feel Lerman, Rachel. 2016. “Piece of Paper that Connects to Internet? UW, Disney Make It a Reality.” The Seattle Times, May 12. http://www.seattletimes.com/business/ technology/uw-disney-team-up-to-create-pieces-of-paper-that-connect-to-thedigital-world/ Poulet, Georges. 1968. “The Phenomenology of Reading.” New Literary History 1 (1): 53–68. https://www.jstor.org/stable/468372 Pressman, Jessica. 2009. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (4): 465–82. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ spo.act2080.0048.402 Pressman, Jessica. 2014. Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Starre, Alexander. 2015. Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization. Iowa City : University of Iowa Press. Stewart, Garrett. 2006. The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Stewart, Garrett. 2011. Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Stewart, Garrett. 2015a. “Between Print Matter and Page Matter: The Codex Platform as Medial Support.” In Media | Matter: The Materiality of Media | Matter as Medium. Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, 47–68. New York: Bloomsbury. Stewart, Garrett. 2015b. “Visualizing Books, Virtualizing Readers.” In The History of the Book. Edited by Sandro Jung and Stephen Colclough, special issue of The Yearbook of English Studies 45: 262–79. doi:10.5699/yearenglstud.45.2015.0262 Stinson, Elizabeth. 2016. “The ‘Memoire’ Typeface Changes Like a Memory as You Use It.” Wired.com, January 27. http://www.wired.com/2016/01/the-memoire-typefacechanges-like-a-memory-as-you-use-it/ Vaidhyanathan, Siva. 2015. “The Rise of the Cryptopticon.” The Hedgehog Review 17 (1): 71–85. http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2015_Spring_ Vaidhyanathan.php

4

Bookwork and Bookishness: An interview with Doug Beube and Brian Dettmer Jessica Pressman

This is a conversation between friends. Doug, Brian, and I met in 2012 in Utrecht, The Netherlands, at a symposium organized by the incomparable Kiene Brillenburg Wurth titled “Book Presence in a Digital Age,” an event that became the backbone for this book. But I was a fan of both Doug and Brian’s art years before I actually met them. I first saw their altered book sculptures in 2009 at the groundbreaking exhibit “Slash: Paper Under the Knife” at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City.1 That astonishing collection of paper-based art, some of which was displayed in cases or on walls while other pieces dripped like white water from the ceiling, exposed a cultural zeitgeist: artists exploring and exploiting a fascination with paper and with books in the moment of the supposed disappearance of the media due to the increase in digital technologies and reading devices. The artists exhibiting works in the gallery space of MAD, as artists always do, defamilarized and illuminated the artifactuality of paper and books in ways that made me see anew. “Slash” lived up to its name; it was an epiphany. I started a new book project that very day. Its title: “Bookishness.” For the past seven years I have been writing about a cultural phenomenon that I call “bookishness,” wherein, in the moment of the book’s supposed obsolescence due to digital technologies, we see the proliferation of creative acts that fetishize and aestheticize the book as artifact. From laptop and iPhone covers that simulate the appearance of books to bedsheets and decorative pillows printed with the covers of classic books, from stop-animation short films that depict books coming to life to bookwork sculpture such as Doug and Brian make. Both Doug and Brian are internationally respected artists, and they have been interviewed many times and in different venues, but they are usually asked about their artistic practices or the larger genre of altered book sculpture. I want this

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interview to do something different. Here, I give them space to speak as scholars of books, book art, and bookwork. The following interview is also a selfish act, a way of getting these brilliant minds to consider questions central to my own research on bookishness and of collectively discussing the changing state of books in our contemporary digital culture. JP: Doug and Brian, you both create book-based art that turns our attention to “Book Presence in a Digital Age,” to crib the title of the conference where we all met. Your work defamiliarizes the book as object: you tear it apart, cut into it, provide provocative and conceptual titles to frame it, and render it artifactual and sculptural in ways that make us see it anew. Literary scholar Garrett Stewart (who also participated in the 2012 conference) argues that bookwork, the genre of altered book sculpture that your art so poignantly represents, “demediates” the book medium by taking away its use as a reading machine. Stewart writes, “Readymade or constructed, such book shapes are canceled as text when deposited as gallery objects” (2011, xiii). Yet I see a connection between your sculptures and book-bound literature, especially to visually designed novels like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010) that exploit the affordances of the codex for literary—and, indeed, textual—purposes. Do you see your art as connected to literature? BD: I think our work operates in an area between literature and art. Doug and I are both participating in a cultural zeitgeist that includes several authors, many of whom you examine in your own research. House of Leaves and Tree of Codes are types of published books that ask questions about the form and format of the book. They dismantle the “fourth wall,” if you will, not always through the voice of the characters within the narrative but in order to experiment with the conceptual underpinning of the book, in a formal and structural way. This has a strong connection to what I do. I’m not using narrative as a primary tool, though I do use language in my work, I am interested in the limitations of narrative and experimenting with what books can do and with what the boundaries of the format do to the content and the way we ingest it. My work, and some of these experimental novels, can both be read in a literary and visual or conceptual ways. The texture becomes as important as the text. DB: Just as Foer selected one of his favorite books to alter, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, I select books written by another author and transform their content. The book as an object is generic in a sense. All books

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basically look the same: they’re rectangular, have a front and back cover, etc., so its form and format is almost (and I emphasize almost) immaterial to its content. I see the literary aspect of my art as a collaboration between me and the other creators involved in making the book; this includes the writer, designer, and publisher. I’m judicious in choosing the title of a book, and I spend days, if not weeks, altering it. I use various power tools to do this alteration, and I consider these acts of engaging in conjunction with literary criticism—a way of building my own critique. Ninetynine percent of the time, my work is content-based and is transformed through visual and physical means. So, despite what Garrett Stewart says, some of my bookwork can be read. I want my work to fluctuate between abstraction and narrative, which often interacts with one another. JP: Were you surprised to hear literary scholars, like Stewart and myself, so taken with your work? BD: I was enlightened during the conference by the presentation of several literary experiments, including House of Leaves and Tree of Codes, which seem to question and consider the possibilities of working within the format of a traditional book. This type of work provides a strong connection between traditional literature and the type of book interventions or sculpture that I do. I can see experimental literature providing a bridge between the literary and the visual or tactile, and by hearing the literary scholars, I got a chance to consider and compare the use of the book in both genres. It just goes to show the many different directions and ways that the book can be used and read. That was particularly interesting for me to see. DB: I greatly appreciate the dialogue with literary scholarship and hearing their insights into my work. Writers and critics focus on areas I did not always consider, approaching my work from a literary point of view that draws out the details and content of what I’m exploring in my sculpture. The visual presentation is a primary mode of entering my work, but there are different ways of reading the content of my bookwork: visual, conceptual, formal, and in context with other art forms and contemporary events. BD: My work is about reading books in new ways and about teaching us to think differently about the media we use. The book is often an uncomfortable format for certain kinds of texts and modes of reading. This is especially true when we think of accessing nonfiction information in a nonlinear manner, as with encyclopedias; the internet is much more

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adequate medium for this type of reading practice. This is why most physical encyclopedias are no longer published. The position reference books are in today has made them an interesting material to explore in my own work. JP: Do you both see yourselves as media scholars and your art as a form of media studies? DB: That’s a great question. I hadn’t thought about it before in the way you’re asking. “Demediation” is Garrett Stewart’s term for how bookwork operates, and there is a demediation or deconstruction of the medium in my art. I’m interested in seeing how far I can push the book before it falls apart. The book is a technology that is not meant to be malleable or flexible in the ways I use it, and I’m trying to force a fluidity onto the book that isn’t intended. Designers of books don’t create these objects to be chopped, folded, gouged, sliced, or twisted, which is what I do to them. Publishers and authors use the book medium as a convenient container to present ideas. But, in the contemporary moment, the utilitarian use of the book as a container for perpetuating human thought has become obsolete. Artists like myself pull the book apart to show that it is no longer the only way to present knowledge and information, especially not in a digital age. BD: The media we use has a large impact on how we digest content; it shapes our minds and influences the way we think. This is a strong consideration in my work. I do think that what both Doug and I do is a form of media study. The philosophers that I am interested in (Vilém Flusser and Friedrich Kittler, to name a couple) are traditionally placed more in media studies than in visual art worlds. I think a lot about the architecture of the book and the confines of the structure. The book is a mini world, both because it contains its own, self-supporting structure and also because many books contain fictional worlds in their content. So, much of my work is about the connection between books and buildings, between designed space and imagined space and how those spaces inform our actions. My work attempts to raise these issues in relation to the book because I am interested in how this medium that we grew up with, the book, is changing along with the ways we learned to use and think about it. This is the media studies component of my work. JP: Your work is often seen in relation to artists’ books, both in connection to and in opposition to that book-based genre of art. Would you say that this reflective, even reflexive, media studies aspect of your work is what serves to distinguish bookwork from artist books?

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DB: I don’t like the term “book artist.” I consider myself a mixed media artist. BD: I see our work as being very different from the tradition of artists’ books. Artists’ books use the book as a canvas and the work exists and operates within the context of a book. They usually don’t push the structure of the book medium or question the context of the book itself. In my art I ask, “how is this [the book] an interesting medium to use and to comment upon?” I am more interested in the book as a found object or cultural artifact to explore. Take an analogy to Nam June Paik’s sculptures employing television and video. He did not write TV shows within the medium but rather used the medium, the hardware of the TV, to create sculpture about the medium. A farmer who grows trees is in a different field than a sculptor who makes wooden carvings. When put in the same genre as book makers I like to joke that I don’t do book-making; I do book-breaking. DB: An important distinction between bookwork and artists’ books is that artists’ books still function as books; you open them and interact with them by flipping pages, there are exceptions but for the most part they function like a book. In contrast, in my work, I challenge the way we interact with and think of these objects. My work is not about binding but about context and how the book sits in space. JP: What do you mean by “context”? DB: I make art to be seen in a 360-degree context. I say that bookwork is about context because it is about viewing an object—the book—in the context of space and time. My art creates a moment of meditation. BD: There’s also the context of the gallery, where the bookwork is viewed. We are calling attention to the contexts in which we view, read, and use books . . . and how these elements are rapidly changing. DB: These contexts changed for artist books too. When Ed Ruscha conceived artists’ books back in the 1960s, he envisioned them as a way to circumvent galleries and to present alternative types of art in a democratic way. Today, artists’ books are exhibited in galleries, museums, and special collections of universities; their purpose and intended audience has flipped. BD: With artists’ books, the intentions of accessibility have followed a similar trajectory as modern architecture and furniture. Eames and others originally intended to create a clean, functional and accessible product but the market has valued the work and put modern design “out of reach” of

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most consumers. Artists’ books began, as Doug pointed out, as a way of making work accessible and more democratic outside of the gallery system. Many artists’ books are now created to operate within a gallery or rarified situation. I think there can be an inherent dishonesty in this relationship. The signifiers of the form are inconsistent with the intended context for display. It’s very awkward to try to view an artists’ book in a gallery context. JP: In my current book project, which is deeply inspired by both of your work, I argue that bookishness is a response to the digital age. Do you see bookwork as indebted to digital technologies and culture? DB: Yes. Bookwork is certainly of its time—a digital moment. Prior to the digital age, books were considered passages for ideas and theories to move into future generations, in both metaphorical and literal ways. A book was a medium for information and message. But, in this contemporary moment, everything’s exploding. Every aspect of the physical world is being deconstructed and challenged: music, architecture, philosophy, art—everything’s changing. It’s very exciting to see. BD: I noticed that recently in an article on artists working with books that most of us we’re about a year or two apart in age—born in the mid1970s. I thought that was poignant. We all had a childhood and school life with books as the only method for teaching and learning, and then we graduated into a world with the proliferation of digital media. Books suddenly lost their primary role. Our growth and development as artists ran parallel to this shift in media and I think this cultural shift played a large role in how we see books. I personally started working with books around 2001, and I had no idea that things would change with books and e-readers so quickly. I couldn’t have imagined that in just a decade we would stop printing encyclopedias and stop using textbooks in many classrooms. The way we receive information is changing, as are the ways our attention spans are fed and trained through the constant information gratification of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter. Because of the digital age, we now see books in different ways, both as material objects and with an air of instant nostalgia about the way things used to be. JP: You mention nostalgia. Do you consider bookwork an expression of nostalgia? BD: I take something from the past, which was used in a particular way, and I alter it. This is not necessarily nostalgia. This type of art addresses

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that fact of material supply and surplus. In a physical sense, there is all this material that people aren’t using anymore: books. We are not currently saturated with rare wood and slabs of marble, but people donate encyclopedias to me in bulk. Making art out of books is an act of recycling or upcycling. It becomes a recycling of the material and also of the content or ideas within. The latter, a conceptual recycling, is much more important. Art is always about derivation, but when it becomes so consciously illustrated, as in the type of work we do, that mode of cycling can be confused for nostalgia. But approaching this art from just a physical perspective, we see that we have a surplus of relevant material from the recent past to work with. We also have many questions and concerns about the loss of information’s physicality that we need to work through. JP: If bookwork helps us to “work through” the loss of the book, then does it have a connection to melancholy? I think that it does, and I see bookishness as reflecting and even supporting the transition from a certain type of relationship to books (as reading devices) to new ways of keeping books around (as aesthetic or fetish objects) even if we aren’t reading them. What do you see as the relationship between bookwork and the death of the book? BD: The idea of death is always lingering in my work. I carve into books to make fragments—ruins and remnants are left over and become art. I also use material that we all acknowledge has died, or at least has become primarily functionless, especially the types of nonfiction books that I usually work with: textbooks, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. So there is some kind of mourning at play in my art, a kind of tribute to how this existing material served a recent past. Beyond melancholy and mourning, I think my work questions how fast we’re moving by rediscovering and reexposing the book in new contexts. DB: The death of the book is very real for me. In my art, I am participating in writing the obituary for the book. But, why lament a dying technology? I don’t have a melancholic view of the book because I’m not particularly fond of a technology when it is limited. That being said, I love reading books with covers and physical pages. My frustration is with the linearity of the book and its constraints. I want the book to be like a computer, and I depict this desire in my art. I can cut and paste elements on the computer and also in my art. I can move pieces and parts around seamlessly, and I can create hyperlinks in the codex. Just consider my

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pieces entitled “Fallen Borders,” “Border Crossing: In the War Room,” and “Dis/connecting the Reality of Old Glory” [Plate 6]. You can see many pages simultaneously and read through and across them in different ways. When it comes down to it, the experience of being human is one of multimodality and synchronicity. We are conscious beings, capable of writing and talking simultaneously; we have different biological systems that all work together at the same time. The brain works in multidimensional ways, but the book does not. You can’t integrate audio, video, or dreams into the codex. The book medium is not representative of what’s possible in our life and in our contemporary times. We are moving from something familiar toward new uses for this medium, uses for which it was never intended. My art helps move us along this path. JP: I, for one, feel better about moving along this path with you two as our guides. Ezra Pound, the poet and literary critic who preoccupied me in my first book, famously wrote, “Artists are the antennae of the race” (1934, 73). You are antennae, archivists, and analyzers of a culture moving away from reading books but one that is not ready to let them go. Your art helps us mourn our losses and appreciate an evolving relationship to books. I thank you both for that, and I also thank you for your insightful conversation.

Note 1 “Slash: Paper Under the Knife,” Dave McFadden Curator, Museum of Art and Design (MAD) New York City, October 14, 2009–April 4, 2010.

Works cited Pound, Ezra. 1934. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions. Stewart, Garrett. 2011. Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Part Two

Media Changes and Materiality

5

Infrathin Platforms: Print on Demand as Auto-Factography Hannes Bajohr

The presence of the book, taken quite literally, depends to a considerable degree on the ease of its production. In the development of printing technology, one of the latest and arguably biggest leaps toward broader accessibility of book production has been the emergence of digital print on demand (POD) (Haugland 2006). First established in the 1980s, POD allows the production of a single book—both printing and binding—from a digital file as an immediate response to an order. Since it became commercially viable in the 1990s, POD has been used both by traditional independent presses and large publishing houses as it alleviates a volatile aspect of publishing: gauging how many copies need to be printed, that is, the creation of “speculative stock” (Gallagher 2014, 244). As Kelly Gallagher puts it, “POD has fundamentally changed the very essence of the publishing model that has, since the days of Gutenberg, been premised on printing a book first and then trying to sell it” (245). Thus, not only does POD allow a more integrated cycle of purchasing, production, and distribution, it also reduces the minimum number of books printed to one. It is exactly this quality that extended the attractiveness of POD beyond the domain of commercial publishing. Apart from the use in libraries and book stores to reproduce unshelved or out-of-print titles (Rapp 2011), the emergence of services like Lulu (est. 2002) and Blurb (est. 2005) has allowed private consumers to participate as well. These companies let anybody print bound books with minimal effort, at low cost, and with practically no financial risk for the author. While it is possible to produce just a single copy for private use, these services also offer integration into the commercial book market by allocating ISBNs and selling their customers’ titles on either their own websites or those of commercial booksellers, such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Thus,

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writes Whitney Anne Trettien, the new technology is redrawing “the boundaries between books, facsimiles, electronic files and databases and, in the process, reconfiguring relationships between readers, authors and editors” (Trettien 2013). In this chapter, I would like to address a particular instance of this reconfigured relationship. Since 2010, a whole subculture has developed around this privateconsumer POD that tries to harness its possibilities for experimental literature. In this literature, one can discern an interplay of reproduction technology and genre that is not unlike the relationship earlier zine culture had to mimeographs or photocopiers (Ludovico 2012, 31–35; Gitelman 2014, 136–50; Anna Poletti’s chapter in this book), a feedback structure of which Lori Emerson has called “readingwriting” (Emerson 2014: xiv). Likewise, in POD publishing the printing technology and the aesthetics of its products stand in a reflexive relationship and influence each other. However, unlike zine culture—which shared a porous boundary with and often incorporated Xerox art (Emerson 2014: Chapter 3; Urbons 1993)—this new POD subculture insists on its products being part of the system of literature, not art. Repeatedly, its proponents made clear that their use of POD does not result in artist’s books or “bookworks,” but in works of literature that are circulated as such (Lin 2014b; Beckwith 2014; see also Bajohr 2016b, 101; Gilbert 2016). In what follows, will take this self-description seriously and suggest that we view the exponents of this current as producers of experimental literature, and as forging a new interchange between publishing technology, dissemination strategy, and textual genre, which fuses elements of conceptual writing, electronic literature, and what I suggest to call “auto-factography.” What unites them is that they make the technological condition of production, and specifically the relationship between digital file and printed book, one of their main literary themes, while feeding back their output into their aesthetic practices.

Infrathin platforms: Gauss PDF, Troll Thread, 0x0a, Traumawien Let me begin with a brief overview of the individuals and groups associated with the experimental POD literature I have in mind. Some of the authors in this subculture include Holly Melgard, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Stephen McLaughlin, and Gregor Weichbrodt; some notable publishers are Gauss PDF in the United

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States and Traumawien in Europe. Sometimes, the term “publisher” is avoided in favor of designations like “publishing collective,” as in the case of Troll Thread, or Textkollektiv, 0x0a.1 Whatever these entities call themselves, they execute the “publishing gesture” (Ludovico 2012, 67) that is a minimum requirement for partaking in literature as a social system. Even in the digital, this gesture remains necessary. The status of a PDF file available on a private website changes considerably once the very same file has been “published” on the website of a “publisher.”2 J. Gordon Faylor, the operator of gauss-pdf.com, has thus called his practice of hosting files not only “publishing” but also the provision of an “infrathin platform for the staging of submitted works” (Beckwith 2014).3 Inframince was Marcel Duchamp’s term for the undefinable, pure difference that, for instance, still remains between identically produced objects (Duchamp 2008, 264). This differentiating non-difference of such publishing lies in the fact that Gauss PDF does little more than what authors could do on their own given a modicum of digital competence. But in a literary system largely devoid of monetary expectations, this staging has a social rather than a commercial function. It not only makes public but also publicizes; it offers recognizability, multiplication, and an advance of trust to the author. Gauss PDF was founded in 2010 as an online platform for “digitally based works” (Gallagher 2013). While it still publishes digital submissions, Gauss PDF has followed a trend in contemporary experimental literature of turning away from purely digital publications to a dual strategy of web and print-ondemand publishing. In 2013, Faylor started the imprint GPDF Editions. Each title is free for download as a PDF, and can be purchased as a POD book on Lulu.com. “With little more than a working knowledge of the [Lulu publication] wizard, one can easily bypass editorial intervention, marketing strategies, and the general publicity bullshit that bolsters most literary markets” (Faylor 2016, 218, my translation). Faylor chose Lulu as the “most efficacious way to manage hasty production at a relatively low cost. I bet TROLL THREAD agrees” (Lin 2014a). It does: Troll Thread, using a Tumblr with a simple theme as a website, has used this model since its inception in late 2010. At first limited to a small group of authors, it has now expanded to publish the work of others, too. Thus, the term “publishing collective” has been both chosen and dismissed, and Troll Thread’s exact status is unclear even among its members (Lin 2014b). The PDF/POD book dual publishing model has since become a soft standard for experimental writing, and has even been copied by the art establishment. The 2014 Zurich exhibition Poetry Will Be Made By All, cocurated by Hans

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Ulrich Obrist and Kenneth Goldsmith, featured books by authors born after 1989; on the accompanying website, all titles could either be downloaded for free or purchased on Lulu (Luma Foundation 2014).4 German author Gregor Weichbrodt, whose output was represented in Zurich with the book On the Road for 17,527 Miles (a list of Google Maps driving instructions recreating the route of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road), started his own writer’s collective, 0x0a, in 2014. On its website, Weichbrodt has reissued the book, with a new design and 0x0a as the publisher, again as PDF and Lulu print (Weichbrodt 2014a; Weichbrodt 2014b). Such redressing and recontextualizing has become especially easy with POD. Another influential platform is Vienna-based Traumawien. Founded, like its American peers, in 2010, Traumawien is a self-described “paradoxical print publisher.” The paradox here, as cofounder Lukas Gross wrote in a mission statement, consists in “transferring late-breaking digital aesthetics into book form” (Gross 2010). The form of the book means that this aesthetics is not merely a conceptual feint—the books are actually meant to be read. Like in the case of the other groups, Traumawien’s is a decidedly literary gesture, not one belonging to the visual arts, as J. R. Carpenter confirms, who spells out the underlying assumption: “The vast majority of the text produced by computer systems— protocols, listings, listings [sic], logs, algorithms, binary codes—is never seen or read by humans. This text is nonetheless internal to our daily thoughts and actions. As such, Traumawien considers these new structures to be literary” (Carpenter 2011). While the presentation of these entities might differ considerably—whereas Gauss PDF and Troll Thread are often intentionally obscure, rarely offering any description of their publications, 0x0a and Traumawien tend to explain and interpret their work5—there are some basic similarities that allow for grouping these platforms together: apart from the dual publishing strategy of PDF file and POD book, they rely on the internet as the sole medium of distribution, and combine elements of conceptual writing and generative electronic literature.

“A genre unto itself ” Some scholars, like Whitney Anne Trettien, have argued that a POD book really is a “thoroughly digital object.” Her essay focuses on the reprints of digitized books “produced from electronic information gathered by software searching

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enormous databases.” Unlike in her case, in which “only once a reader purchases a POD reprint (usually through the web) .  .  . the formal materiality of the electronic text [is] actualized in paper,” in the genre at hand any inclination to hierarchize the two elements—the text and the book, the immaterial and its materialization—is actively undermined by the authors. It might be more useful to call “POD” the umbrella term for both the file and the product, and to conceive of this double-structure as at once analog and digital. It is true that the finished, analog POD book has an inherent connection to the PDF; its very existence relies on the creation of a digital master from which the copies of the book are made. On the other hand, in the production cycle of Lulu and Blurb, the PDF really only makes sense as the starting point of the future book, and, as we shall see, the attributes of the file are determined by the material constraints of POD. Furthermore, as Lisa Gitelman has shown, the PDF itself possesses a certain “ontological complexity,” since it at once simulates the printed page, and falls short of it (Gitelman 2014, 128). “PDFs achieve a measure of fixity because of the ways they simultaneously compare to printed documents and contrast with other kinds of digital documents that seem less fixed—less paperlike— as they are used” (119). The platforms here discussed play with precisely this complexity. Because of the ease of production and dissemination that services like Lulu and Blurb provide, the unstable ontological status of POD can be investigated, manipulated, and thrown into crisis by artistic and literary means.6 “Electronic textuality is .  .  . locatable, even though we are not accustomed to thinking of it in physical terms,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum points out in a discussion of a “forensic” approach to storage media (Kirschenbaum 2012, 3). This idea holds for these works, too: few things illustrate “the heterogeneity of digital data and its embodied inscriptions” (6) as well as the books on these “infrathin” platforms. This can be illustrated by looking at two elements of this genre that seem to characterize it especially well: the influence of generative and conceptual practices, which are used to play with the status of the connection between file and object, and the turn to auto-factography, a type of writing that selfreflexively represents structural, socioeconomic, and material conditions of its production. What characterizes the literature of platforms like Gauss PDF, 0x0a, Troll Thread, and Traumawien is that it highlights and exacerbates the instability inherent in POD; what unites their various strategies and elevates their works to the level of literary genre is that they all proceed from an acute awareness of this instability in their structure, production, and dissemination.

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(a) The generative and the conceptual element Many of the titles that these platforms offer as POD books and PDFs are, in a way, anti-hermeneutic books: the jouissance they evoke comes less from reading them, more from reflecting their underlying concepts (Goldsmith 2011, 100). Where the goal no longer is to decipher the meaning of or internal connections between words, sentences, and texts, the aesthetic experience of such works shifts from producing sense to the experience of being battered by nonsense. Sianne Ngai called the effect of this literary stratagem—still with a view to the classical avantgardes—“stuplimity.” “Like the Kantian sublime, the stuplime points to the limits of our representational capabilities, not through the limitlessness or infinity of concepts, but through a no less exhaustive confrontation with the discrete and finite in repetition.” However, the boredom of the stuplime “paradoxically forces the reader to go on in spite of its equal enticement to surrender . . . pushing the reader to constantly formulate and reformulate new tactics for reading” (Ngai 2000). These books, then, have an immediate effect on textual hermeneutics— which now considers concept, not content—and on the practice of reading itself: they no longer require deep attention. Instead of a close reading, they demand a “hyper reading,” as N. Katherine Hayles calls it, “skimming, scanning, fragmenting, and juxtaposing texts” as modes of reception (Hayles 2012, 12). The joy of the excessive and the willful production of boredom are tactics known from modernist literature—think Gertrude Stein—but they have in recent years been coopted both by electronic literature (Bajohr 2016a; Bootz and Funkhouser 2014) and conceptual writing (Duffy 2016; Emerson 2012). Contemporary computer-generated literature is often based on the ability to produce large amounts of text automatically, which provides it with an almost inherent tendency toward inundation. Conceptualism, understood as letting the idea of a work take precedence over its material form or the experience of that form, often relishes the conflict between an idea and the limits of its realizability—just think of Douglas Huebler’s Variable Piece #70 (In Process) Global (1971), in which he proposed “to photographically document the existence of everyone alive.” Since the turn of the millennium, writers like Kenneth Goldsmith have transposed this strategy from the visual arts onto literature under the title of “conceptual” or “uncreative writing” (Goldsmith 2011; for a bibliography, see Zeltil 2017). Both modes of production, because of the rule following inherent in them, have a penchant for reducing “expression” as aesthetic determinant, displacing the author-subject, and giving the outcome

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an aesthetic autonomy even as it devalues its status as “work.”7 Especially literary conceptualism understands itself to be part of an extended lineage of experimental literature and carries on a (post-)modernist legacy (see especially Dworkin and Goldsmith 2011). However, neither electronic literature nor conceptual writing seems fully to encompass this new experimental literature that plays out in POD. The “return to print” performed by these platforms stands counter to the purported genealogy of electronic literature “as a continuation of experimental print literature,” thus suggesting some kind of directional development (Hayles 2009, 17) that was frequently thought to lead to “the crisis of the codex as a cultural form” (Spoerhase 2017, 87). Instead, these platforms highlight the unstable connection between material object and digital file. Similarly, J. Gordon Faylor deems the association with conceptualism accidental,8 and Troll Thread member Joey Yearous-Algozin considers “this writing as coming after conceptual writing. It couldn’t have been made without that break, but in the permission it afforded us, something different emerged.” While both electronic literature and conceptual writing are influences, “this work has become a genre unto itself ” (Lin 2014b). Certainly, self-descriptions like these must be taken with a grain of salt; they are more apt for some works than for others. For instance, Traumawien has professed a focus on “networked texts, algorithmic texts, interfictions, chatlogs, codeworks, software art and visual mashup prose” (Gross 2010) and published a book by Australian codeworks writer Mez Breeze, whose poetry appropriates the look and vocabulary of programming languages (Breeze 2011). An actual combination of electronic literature and conceptual writing strategies can be found in Stephen McLaughlin’s Puniverse (Gauss PDF, 2014). “An ingenious crossing of an idiom set and a rhyming dictionary” (as the subtitle reads), Puniverse plays through all rhyming combinations of the elements of a given number of idioms, producing a plethora of “puns.” An expression like “a bad egg” is multiplied thus: “an ad egg / an add egg / a brad egg / a cad egg / a chad egg / a clad egg / a dad egg / a fad egg / a gad egg / a glad egg / a grad egg / a had egg / a lad egg / a mad egg / a nad egg / a pad egg / a plaid egg / a rad egg / a sad egg / a scad egg / a shad egg / a tad egg / a bad beg / a bad keg / a bad leg / a bad meg / a bad peg / a bad segue.” (McLaughlin 2014, 1: n.p. (8 in PDF))

(Note that the original phrase is not included and has to be inferred.) McLaughlin achieves this output with minimal effort: all that is needed is to execute a script

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that checks the elements of the finite idiom set for the rhymes of their subelements, and returns the results; yet the outcome of this function, once printed, requires fifty-seven volumes of Lulu books. This type of generative-conceptual literature—constructed, not found; written, but by code—seems to draw much of its effect from the connection with the form of the book, not least through the joy of the excessive that equips the work with an inner aesthetic tension. While Puniverse can be circulated as a PDF file—and indeed is—it still requires the possibility of being printed in order to achieve its vertiginous, stuplime effect. This effect, I argue, hinges upon the dual nature of POD as both material and immaterial, as the work being both a book and a file. As in much of conceptual literature, its potential, so to speak, is its potentiality, and it very well might be that actualization neutralizes the tension derived from its “wastefulness”; such an accumulation of print could be more sculptural than literary. But what is important is that it can be actualized, and Lulu will do it for a mere $381.90. If McLaughlin’s text achieves its expansiveness by a combinatory operation, another way to elicit such an overwhelming effect is to offer only a slice of the vastness implicit in a concept. This is what is achieved by Gregor Weichbrodt’s generative work I Don’t Know (0x0a/Frohmann Verlag, 2015). The text is created by a Python script that concatenates the titles of linked Wikipedia articles with a set of stock phrases. The result is a soliloquy in which a narrator denies knowledge of the subjects they list. It begins: I’m not well-versed in Literature. Sensibility—what is that? What in God’s name is An Afterword? I haven’t the faintest idea. And concerning Book design, I am fully ignorant. What is “A Slipcase” supposed to mean again, and what the heck is Boriswood? The Canons of page construction—I don’t know what that is. I haven’t got a clue. How am I supposed to make sense of Traditional Chinese bookbinding, and what the hell is an Initial? (Weichbrodt 2015, 4)9

As Julia Pelta Feldman observes, the narrator’s questioning “skews from the absurd—‘I don’t know what people mean by “A Building”’ . . . to the perfectly reasonable: ‘Vinca alkaloids are unfamiliar to me. And I’m sorry, did you say “Vinpocetine”?” (Feldman 2015). More often than not, the text undermines itself: “I’m completely ignorant of Art Deco architecture in Arkansas. Can you tell me how to get to The Drew County Courthouse, Dual State Monument, Rison Texaco Service Station or Chicot County Courthouse?” (Weichbrodt 2015, 212) The reader, Feldman writes, can hardly fail to acknowledge this incongruity: “I

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don’t know about you, but the narrator of I Don’t Know knows a hell of a lot more about Arkansas’s architectural history than I do” (Feldman 2015). And after having jumped, in truly Latourian fashion,10 from literature to book binding, to soccer, to architecture, and a plethora of other topics that are only connected through Wikipedia’s internal genus-species relation, the book ends after 351 pages, seemingly unaware of yet another performative contradiction: I’ve never heard of Postmodernism. What the hell is A Dystopia? I don’t know what people mean by “The Information Age.” Digitality—dunno. The Age of Interruption? How should I know? What is Information Overload? I don’t know. (Weichbrodt 2015, 352)

That the text closes here is almost too good to be true, and again, it raises the suspicion—this time of authorial intervention: Wikipedia’s taxonomical structure could indubitably fill more pages—but how many exactly? By withholding the answer, and choosing a very deliberate point for the text to break off (“Information overload”), the text conjures a feeling of stuplimity (quite literally the sublime of the stupid) similar to Puniverse, precisely because the expanses of the unknown are unknown; it certainly adds to this effect that I Don’t Know is a long reminder of the vastness of individual ignorance in the age of networked communication. McLaughlin and Weichbrodt’s texts, no matter whether they are spelled out completely or appear abridged, are finite. There is an end in sight, and this end is determined by the logic of the system employed, be it the entirety of Wikipedia, or the number of total iterations in a non-recursive function that couples list items. As soon as recursive functions—functions that call themselves—are used, however, things change. Executed on a computer, a recursive function lacking a set breakpoint would either run forever or overflow the computer’s memory and cause it to crash. A text thus produced is potentially infinite; its finitude is again an index of intervention, authorial or otherwise. This vector into infinity remains even if this recursion is enacted manually. In Lawrence Giffin’s Non Facit Saltus (Troll Thread, 2014), each page is an explanation of how to reach the next. For example, page 13 reads: “If you want to go to page 14, turn to page 14” (Giffin 2014, 13). It is a very basic recursive function, that of incrementation, but without an external criterion for when to stop, it could go on forever. In Giffin’s case, this criterion is provided by the finite and discrete structure of the book. Because of the book’s spatiotemporal stability (as opposed to a stream of potentially infinite text, as in the case of

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Twitter bots), it references distinct pages that can be “called” independently (this would not work with a scrollable page or a mere text file); because of the unambiguous imperative “turn!” they require the materialization of the object, or, as metaphorized ones, the simulated makeup of the book: a PDF. Again, we find the structure of file and object pointing back and forth to one another.

(b) The auto-factographic element While relative document layouts, like Word files or epubs, allow for a text to be “reflowed” responsively for every conceivable output device (Ludovico 2012, 98), a PDF, just like the page of a book, is absolute in its layout (Gitelman 2014, 114–15). The de-facto standard of commercial e-publishing, aimed at e-readers and iPads, is the epub format; for the experimental platforms here described, the specifications of the commercial POD providers made PDFs their standard. Thus, not only do the constraints of a service like Lulu’s (maximum number of pages, page size, etc.) inform the way the POD book is created, disseminated, and perceived, but they also have reverberations for the form of the text: The formatting of the POD book influences the formatting of its underlying file, and vice versa.11 A direct riff on this interplay is Joey Yearous-Algozin’s 9/11 911 Calls in 911 Pt. Font (Troll Thread, 2012). It contains what its title announces: nine-hundredand-eleven characters from a New York Fire Department transcript of calls to 911 on September 11, 2001. Because they are set in a font size of 911 points, the text extends onto a little under nine hundred PDF pages (mostly, a single letter fills one page, but occasionally it is two). A text that would scarcely occupy the screen of a Kindle is stretched to the size of two heavy volumes (which arguably are meant to evoke the Twin Towers). Since the dimensions of the PDF follow Lulu standards, the characters shown on each page are cut off, making the resulting text almost illegible. As soon as it is highlighted in a PDF viewer and copied, it is possible to view it in its short entirety; the text “hides” under the constraints of the printed page but is left legible in the file. American Psycho by Jason Huff and Mimi Cabell (Traumawien 2012) plays on the relationship between three materializations of the text: the PDF and the POD book, and also the original layout of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, on which both instantiations are based (Figure 5.1). The entirety of Ellis’s novel was sent back and forth “between two GMail accounts page by page.” Huff and Campbell then “saved the relational ads for each page and added them back into

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Figure 5.1 Jason Huff and Mimi Cabell, American Psycho (Traumawien, 2012), 3.

the text as footnotes. . . . The constellations of footnoted ads throughout these pages retell the story of American Psycho in absence of the original text” (Huff and Cabell 2012a). While the main aim of their work is the privacy-encroaching advertising model that fuels the Google empire, American Psycho’s conceptual framework requires the closest possible resemblance between source and outcome, book, file, and POD. Works like these become self-aware of the conditions of their production and gain the flavor of what a certain current in Soviet formalism called “factography.” Probably its best-known description is Sergei Tret’iakov’s essay “The Biography of the Object” (1929). Tret’iakov proposed to center a novel not on the psychology of the protagonist, but the production process of an object, thus

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doing away with bourgeois subjectivity, anthropocentrism, and obliviousness to socioeconomic processes. The biography of the object, “extremely useful as a cold shower for littérateurs,” is constructed like a “conveyor belt along which a unit of raw material is moved and transformed into a useful product through human effort” (Tret’iakov 2006, 57–62, 61). Instead of The Brothers Karamazov, such factography could have titles like “The Forest, Bread, Coal, Iron, Flax, Cotton, Paper, The Locomotive, and The Factory” (63). While Tret’iakov still had a representational, world-depicting model in mind—a realist novel for things, not persons—the literature considered here makes factography perform itself: it becomes auto-factography. Yearous-Algozin and Huff/Cabell focus on the intricate and often circular relationship between file and object. They do not “say” anything, as one could put it with Wittgenstein, about their production but “show” it (Wittgenstein 2002: sec. 4.1212)—they do not offer a propositional description of publishing under the conditions of digital technology, but directly enact it in a nonpropositional way through their own materiality. Thus, content is secondary to objecthood, and instead of writing the biography of the thing, the thing reveals its story on its own. This material self-referentiality has of course precursors in art and literature: Rauschenberg’s white paintings and the famous black page in Tristram Shandy could possibly also be called works of auto-factography, although only peripherally. In the POD literature of these infrathin platforms, however, this reflexivity is so central that it has been elevated to the status of genre element. If auto-factography here addresses the medial aspects of the underlying data structures, in some works such auto-factographical showing extends to the socioeconomic conditions of their production. Jean Keller’s The Black Book (Lulu/ self-published, 2013) (Figure 5.2) is a tome of 740 pages—the maximum number allowed by Lulu—that is completely black. A gallon of ink used for POD printing costs over four thousand dollars, as Keller explains on the Lulu sales page: However, the price of a book is not calculated according to the amount of ink used in its production. For example, a Lulu book of blank pages costs an artist as much to produce as a book filled with text or large photographs. Furthermore, as the number of pages increases, the price of each page decreases. A book containing the maximum number of pages printed entirely in black ink therefore results in the lowest cost and maximum value for the artist. (Keller 2013a)

At first appearing parasitic, even sabotaging, The Black Book is a reminder that POD writers are enmeshed in negotiations about their productive resources just like any other artist; resorting to an act of subversion like Keller’s “hack” makes

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Figure 5.2 Jean Keller, The Black Book (Lulu/self-published, 2013).

apparent that writers get the short end of the stick as they represent Lulu’s main revenue stream. In Reimbur$ement (Troll Thread, 2013), Holly Melgard similarly, yet reversely, exhibits the limits of POD writing and the precariousness of the author’s labor conditions by focusing on the dissemination, rather than the material production, of the work. In the introduction, she states, “Sometimes the work I do results in earning neither income, livelihood, nor play, and often I find myself paying to work rather than being paid for work. Whenever this happens, I count my losses and take my chances gambling for alternatives” (Melgard 2013, 4). This is meant quite literally: the book is filled with scans of lottery tickets and scratch cards—six years’ worth of gambling for “$ for life.” Because Lulu lets its producers set the selling price at will while the costs of production remain the same, Melgard’s book is $329.53, the equivalent of her gambling losses, “plus whatever Lulu charges for its print on demand services” (ibid.). It is at once a utopian and a commonsensical project, as it demands no more than pay equivalent to labor—“Reimbursement is for the work” (ibid.)— except the work being play, and the play being the gamble for the sustenance that makes the work possible in the first place.

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Of course, the generative-conceptual and auto-factographic practices are only two of the elements this literature employs in its strategy of self-disclosure, and I do not mean to suggest that there aren’t more, nor that this disclosure is the only function it serves. However, I believe that much of this genre’s relevance today derives from its unique capacity to articulate an instability that is indicative of a general process of digitization—be it in its technological form, investigating the ontological slippage between page and file, book and PDF, digital and analog, or, as Melgard and Keller show, in its socioeconomic ramifications. Indeed, it is in this context that auto-factography’s self-reflexivity may offer its greatest political potential, since it is able to target even the conditions of its own existence. One could call Melgard and Keller’s interventions an institutional critique of the seemingly liberating potential of POD and selfentrepreneurialism, revealing how, in the economy of the digital, the position of the writer is still dependent on the limited access to the means of production and thus as precarious as ever. And yet, this type of POD literature also shows that it is too easy to reject POD technology or companies like Lulu wholesale as exponents of a “slick neoliberal logic” that promotes “individual empowerment through self-publication,” as Lisa Gitelman suggests in this book. Rather, Keller and Melgard attempt to face the restraints of this neoliberal logic head-on—as, in fact, all artists must—knowing that the escapism ostentatiously “analog” production techniques provide does not elude the aporias of labor. Instead of simply avoiding new technologies and their entanglement with capitalism, experimental POD literature hyper-reflexively exploits even its own disappointment in the inability to be unaffected by this technology/art/capital nexus. This, I would argue, gives it greater political heft than more traditional forms of content-based literature, or the, often regressive, luddism of a “postdigital” return to older printing and publishing technologies (such as are discussed in Cramer 2013). This kind of literature is an exceptionally contemporary, or actuel, textual genre. None of the platforms I have discussed here are older than seven years, and it is anything but certain that they will exist seven years from now—in their current form, unlikelier still (a point made in Soullelis 2013). But this is a strength, not a weakness: as this literature reveals both POD’s ontological instability and its socioeconomic conditions of emergence, it uncovers a moment that is very much our own: a period in which digitality is no longer new enough to be constantly perceptible, but still sufficiently new that the difference between the seemingly “analog” book form and a digital file is felt as peculiar, at times even as uncanny.

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This is why the POD literature I have presented here acts as both reaffirmation of the book and as its destabilization. For while the decision for books printed on demand revaluates a medium that is perpetually said to be on the brink of being outdated (Price 2009), it does not treat the book as particularly high-class but rather a conspicuously “poor” medium: Lulu’s printing quality is notoriously abysmal, and the “semiotic power of paper and binding” Anna Poletti addresses in her contribution to this book does not so much communicate the preciousness of objects from a pre-digital era, but rather their atrophied stage. POD does not convey authenticity and subjectivity, as in the case of Poletti’s zines; its material poverty rather emphasizes the anonymousness of its concepts, and its problematization of authorship. One could thus understand POD literature as the reverse of the literary trend that Jessica Pressman has called “bookishness,” the “fetishization of the book-bound nature of the codex as a reading object” (Pressman 2009). The POD book is anything but fetishizable. Rather, in POD, the book is simultaneously present and absent.

Notes This essay is based on an earlier version of this text published as Bajohr (2016b). 1 www.gauss-pdf.com; www.traumawien.at; www.Troll Thread.tumblr.com; www.0x0a.li (all accessed August 10, 2015). There are certainly many more platforms/publishers, like Truck Books or basbooks, but I believe that their practices are well represented by the ones discussed here. 2 This is contra Florian Cramer: “But in the 21st century, even the primal criterion of literature has become obsolete: that of being published. In the age of homepages, blogs and social networks, the classical distinction between non-published personal writing and published writing is moot, and with it the distinction between everyday communication and publishing” (Cramer 2013). This position overlooks the fact that the perlocutionary part of a speech act (and the publishing gesture is one) depends in its outcome on the identity and the status of the agent performing it: it makes a difference who publishes what in which context. The blindness to these conditions accounts for much of the crushed hopes of early internet utopianism. 3 It is important to note that the “PDF” in Gauss PDF is not supposed to refer to the file format but the Gauss probability distribution function in statistics—although it is clear that the association with the file type is very much encouraged. 4 So far, the exhibition, cocurated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Kenneth Goldsmith, lists 131 poets.

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5 In the case of Troll Thread, there is not even a hint as to what it is; the “about” page offers the tautology: “TROLL THREAD IS TROLL THREAD.” The difference can at least somewhat be explained by the fact that the US-based platforms are part of a literary discourse that is more open to, and more acquainted with, the aesthetics of conceptual poetry; more about this in the next section. 6 I have given a more detailed account of the ontology of this instability in Bajohr 2016a,b. 7 Especially for literary conceptualism, these arguments have become commonplace, and the backlash against them has already begun (see Perloff 2010; Dworkin 2011 for the now-classic exposition of conceptual writing; see Perlow 2015 for a discussion of the criticism leveled at Kenneth Goldsmith in particular). 8 “Given the accessibility and contemporaneity of its affect, Conceptual methods have accrued a wider audience since 2010, doubtless. But despite precipitating some misleading characterizations of GPDF (e.g., that it only publishes Conceptual work), this has mostly been an invigorating development. . . . GPDF acts merely as a feasible place for Conceptual works to land among other types of work; there is certainly no direct or overarching affiliation” (Lin 2014a). 9 For this book, Weichbrodt cooperated with ebook publisher Frohmann Verlag; while the epub can be purchased through the publisher, the POD can be ordered from Lulu. 10 Ian Bogost has coined the term “Latour litany” for a list of radically diverse things illustrating the possibility of considering them ontologically equal (Bogost 2012). Bogost has even written a generator that produces such lists, also by accessing Wikipedia (Bogost 2009). 11 See Harry Burke’s discussion, who acknowledges that “PDFs . . . gain authority by looking and functioning like a page” (Burke 2015). But this is only half the story. While he highlights a leftover element of high-brow book fetishism, he overlooks that it is the commercial and technological substructure of POD itself that prescribes this format. The page/PDF relationship is dictated by current technological needs rather than by overcome values.

Works cited Bajohr, Hannes. 2016a. “Das Reskilling der Literatur.” In Code und Konzept: Literatur und das Digitale. Edited by Hannes Bajohr, 7–21. Berlin: Frohmann. Bajohr, Hannes. 2016b. “Experimental Writing in Its Moment of Digital Technization: Post-Digital Literature and Print-on-Demand Publishing.” In Publishing as Artistic Practice. Edited by Annette Gilbert, 100–15. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Beckwith, Caleb. 2014. “Interview with J. Gordon Faylor.” The Conversant. http:// theconversant.org/?p=8426.

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Bogost, Ian. 2009. “Latour Litanizer: Generate Your Own Latour Litanies.” http:// bogost.com/writing/blog/latour_litanizer. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnessota Press. Bootz, Philippe and Funkhouser, Christopher. 2014. “Combinatory and Automatic Text Generation.” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson, 83–85. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Breeze, Mez. 2011. Human Readable Messages. Vienna: Traumawien. Burke, Harry. 2015. “Page Break.” Texte zur Kunst. https://www.textezurkunst.de/98/ burke-page-break. Carpenter, J. R. 2011. “Paradoxical Print Publishers TRAUMAWIEN.” Jacket2. http:// jacket2.org/commentary/paradoxical-print-publishers-traumawien. Cramer, Florian. 2013. “Post-Digital Writing.” Electronic Book Review. http://www. electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/postal. Duchamp, Marcel. 2008. Duchamp Du Signe, Suivi de Notes. Edited by Michael Sanouille and Paul Matisse. Paris: Flammarion. Duffy, Nikolai. 2016. “Reading the Unreadable: Kenneth Goldsmith, Conceptual Writing and the Art of Boredom.” Journal of American Studies 50 (3): 679–98. doi:10.1017/S0021875814001248. Dworkin, Craig. 2011. “The Fate of Echo.” In Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, xxiii–liv. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Emerson, Lori. 2012. “Conceptual Poetry.” In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Edited by Roland Greene, 292–93. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Emerson, Lori. 2014. Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Faylor, J. Gordon. 2016. “Lulu Freundlich.” In Code und Konzept: Literatur und das Digitale. Edited by Hannes Bajohr, 217–19. Berlin: Frohmann. Feldman, Julia Pelta. 2015. “Gregor Weichbrodt: No Offense.” http://0x0a.li/de/gregorweichbrodt-no-offense/. Gallagher, Kelly. 2014. “Print-on-Demand: New Models and Value Creation.” Publishing Research Quarterly 30 (2): 244–48. doi:10.1007/s12109-014-9367-2 Gallagher, Kristen. 2013. “The Gauss Interview: Chris Alexander Talks to J. Gordon Faylor.” Jacket2. http://jacket2.org/commentary/gauss-interview. Giffin, Lawrence. 2014. Non Facit Saltus. Oakland, CA: Gauss PDF. Gilbert, Annette. 2016. “Publishing as Artistic Practice.” In Publishing as Artistic Practice. Edited by Annette Gilbert, 6–39. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Gitelman, Lisa. 2014. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durman: Duke University Press. Goldsmith, Kenneth. 2011. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Gross, Lukas. 2010. “Traumawien Statement February 2010.” http://traumawien.at/ about/statement-february-2010.rtf. Haugland, Ann. 2006. “Opening the Gates: Print On-Demand Publishing as Cultural Production.” Publishing Research Quarterly 22 (3): 3–16. doi:10.1007/s12109-0060019-z Hayles, N. Katherine. 2009. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huff, Jason and Cabell, Mimi. 2012a. “American Psycho.” traumawien.at/prints/ american-psycho. Huff, Jason and Cabell, Mimi. 2012b. American Psycho. Vienna: Traumawien. Keller, Jean. 2013a. “The Black Book.” www.lulu.com/shop/jean-keller/the-black-book/ paperback/product-21008894.html. Keller, Jean. 2013b. The Black Book. Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 2012. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lin, Tan. 2014a. “Gauss PDF Interview with J. Gordon Faylor.” Harriet Blog. May 4. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/05/gauss-pdf-interview-with-jgordon-faylor. Lin, Tan. 2014b. “Troll Thread Interview.” Harriet Blog. May 4. http://www. poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/05/troll-thread-interview. Ludovico, Alessandro. 2012. Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1894. Eindhoven/Rotterdam: Onomatopee 77. Luma Foundation. 2014. “Poetry Will Be Made by All.” http://poetrywillbemadebyall.com. McLaughlin, Stephen. 2014. Puniverse. Vol. 1. Oakland, CA: Gauss PDF. Melgard, Holly. 2013. Reimburement. Troll Thread. Ngai, Sianne. 2000. “Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics.” Postmodern Culture 10 (2). doi:10.1353/pmc.2000.0013. Perloff, Marjorie. 2010. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Perlow, Seth. 2015. “The Conceptual War Machine: Agonism and the Avant-Garde.” Criticism 57 (4): 659–83. doi:10.13110/criticism.57.4.0659 Pressman, Jessica. 2009. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (4): 465–82. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ spo.act2080.0048.402 Price, Leah. 2009. “Reading as if for Life.” Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (4): 1–10. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0048.403 Rapp, David. 2011. “Print-on-Demand Meets Public Libraries.” Library Journal 136 (22): 22.

Infrathin Platforms Soullelis, Paul. 2013. “Search, Compile, Publish.” http://soulellis.com/2013/05/searchcompile-publish. Spoerhase, Carlos. 2017. “Beyond the Book?” New Left Review 103 (1): 87–99. Tret’iakov, Sergei. 2006. “The Biography of the Object.” October 118: 57–62. Trettien, Whitney Anne. 2013. “A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: The Case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica. ” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7 (1). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000150/000150.html Urbons, Klaus. 1993. Copy Art: Kunst und Design mit dem Fotokopierer. 2nd ed. Cologne: DuMont. Weichbrodt, Gregor. 2014a. “On the Road.” http://0x0a.li/en/text/on-the-road/. Weichbrodt, Gregor. 2014b. On the Road. 0x0a. Weichbrodt, Gregor. 2015. I Don’t Know. Berlin: Frohmann. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2002. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, introduction by Bertrand Russell. London: Routledge. Yearous-Algozin, Joey. 2012. 9/11 911 Calls in 911 Pt. Font. Troll Thread. Zeltil, Yigru. 2017. A Bibliography of Conceptual Writing. Bucharest: khora impex.

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6

Genre and Materiality: Autobiography and Zines Anna Poletti

The title of this chapter offers four terms: two general, two specific. The pairings of these terms propose that examining how the genre of autobiography is practiced in the specific media form of the zine can be a means of advancing our understanding of the intersection between genre and materiality. Specifically, this chapter will consider two examples of how the material affordances of the zine— sometimes in codex form, sometimes not—evidence the continued signifying power of paper and binding in a digital age. This power influences both the kinds of life narratives that are produced, and reader’s experiences of autobiography as a specific genre that establishes, situates, and comments on the relationship between the individual and the social field, a field that is informed by print culture (Crain 2013) and shaped by narratives as a way of attaching meaning to one’s lived experience as a member of collective, where genres function as a tool for coming to terms with affect (Berlant 2008). This chapter demonstrates that when presented in the form of the zine, the act of self-life-writing is extended beyond linguistic and narrative representation to reflect on the mediality of the social field. One way this extension occurs is through the manipulation of the physical frame of the text. In the case studies presented here, the material frame is used to comment on the difference between personal communication and confession as a literary genre, and to dramatize the reader’s decision to read. These case studies evidence that thinking about the tactility of bookish materials such as paper and binding can further our understanding of how frames work to establish genres, and how framing shapes in autobiography. Zines provide a compelling case study for considering the importance of the materiality of frames to a range of autobiographical texts, because zine makers are consistently engaged with the practice of producing the material text—the zine.

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I will begin by situating the rise of autobiographical discourse in contemporary culture, and then outline current theories of genre as social action (Miller) and as a flexible context in which individual literary works are produced and encountered (Frow). My analysis of materiality and genre in autobiographical zines will center on extending Frow’s arguments regarding the importance of the frame—the threshold between the “inside” and the “outside” of the text—in establishing genre as a context. While Frow largely treats the frame as a linguistic construct in works of literature, I will demonstrate that in zines, the material affordances of the media form—paper, the use of photocopier as a tool of remediation, the opportunity for experimentation in binding and presentation— frame the autobiographical text as material object in meaningful ways. As many critics have noted, the twenty-first century has seen a marked turn toward the autobiographical in literature and media. In the literary field, critics and scholars began to refer to a “memoir boom”: a rise in the production and popularity of memoir, accompanied by the increased cultural visibility and impact of life writing (Armitstead 2001; Brooks 2001; Gilmore 2001; Rak 2013; Radstone 2007; Smith and Watson 2010). This “boom” is quantitative and qualitative; it is characterized by a rise in numbers of memoirs published, the increasing influence of personal narrative in politics and culture, and more scholarly focus on the role of life writing in literature, media, and culture (Couldry 2008; Gilmore 2001; Rak 2013; Yagoda 2009). In the media and cultural studies, the rise of reality television—also referred to as a “reality boom” (Sanneh 2011)—drew the attention (and often the condemnation) of cultural commentators and attention from scholars (Andrejevic 2004). As the internet began to exert more influence in the media ecology, it became apparent that it, too, was a space where self-representation and identity work were core activities that happened through writing. The identity “play” (Turkle 1995) and use of the blog for life writing (Lejeune 2009) that characterized the early years of the “world wide web” have been replaced by social media, a suite of platforms and practices that have sparked enormous interest from scholars of media, culture, and sociology. In film studies, the personal documentary challenged an understanding of the documentary as an “objective” form (Renov 2008). As Ben Yagoda observes, “Autobiographically speaking, there has never been a time like it. Memoir has become the central form of the culture: not only the way stories are told, but the way arguments are put forth, products and properties marketed, ideas floated, acts justified, reputations constructed or salvaged” (2009, 28).

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There has clearly been a rise in autobiographical discourse that is transmedial, and in this chapter I argue that the materiality of media forms is fundamental to the way that autobiography is enacted by artists and everyday people, and how it is interpreted by audiences and critics. As the chapters in this book illustrate, the increasingly diverse media ecology in which people produce and consume media demands that we sharpen our attention to the semiotic power of the materiality of form. How autobiography is materially framed in subtle and powerful ways is the focus of this chapter. I approach thinking about the use of paper and other materials in personal zines through the lens of contemporary genre theory (Frow 2015; Rak 2013) and N. Katherine Hayles’s arguments regarding the importance of materiality to contemporary literary forms (2002). But given that autobiography can be read as a genre, a linguistic register, or a discourse, I will first defend my decision to situate autobiography as a genre. Thinking of autobiography as a genre is important if we are to better understand the role of materiality in the influence of autobiography in contemporary culture and politics. This is because, as I explain below, genre theory provides a means of situating the interaction between individual texts and individual readers within their larger, systemic contexts. The contribution this chapter makes to this way of thinking about genre is to extend the analysis of genre as a linguistic system to include a more nuanced analysis of the role of materiality in signaling genre and in acting as a threshold between the “inside” and “outside” of a given work. Autobiography is a compelling case study for this, as the referential relationship between the inside and outside of the text is central to its appeal.

Autobiography: Genre or register? Rather than encouraging the production of rigid taxonomies that seek to classify texts, contemporary approaches emphasize that genre is an inherently dynamic and shifting system that, in the literary field, is actively engaged by authors, readers, publishers, reviewers, and booksellers. The predominance of autobiographical modes or styles across media forms might tempt us to think of autobiography as a discourse or a rhetorical register rather than the strict “law” often associated with genre (Derrida 1980). An approach following this line of thinking might allow the critic to avoid the seemingly inevitable “reductionism, rules, formalism” thinking about genre appears to produce (Miller 1984, 151). However, recent developments in genre theory persuasively

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argue that genre is a useful and flexible term for conceptualizing the dynamic interaction between individual texts and their readers and for understanding individual moments of reading as occurring within a larger, reliable yet dynamic semiotic system. To this end, John Frow argues that “genre is neither a property of (and located ‘in’) text, nor a projection of (and located ‘in’) readers; it exists as a part of the relationship between texts and readers, and it has a systemic existence. It is a shared convention with a social force” (2015, 112). Frow draws on Carolyn R. Miller’s (1984) influential formulation of genre as social action whereby individual acts of expression or communication draw on the structures produced by recurring situations in the social field. Elsewhere, Frow points out that the “New Rhetorical” tradition, in which Miller’s work is situated, offers a “particularly powerful refocusing of the idea of genre from a taxonomic function (in which texts are thought to belong to a genre instead of being uses of it) to a pragmatic function” (2007, 1630). He warns, however, that the emphasis on social environment in New Rhetorical tradition must be “supplemented by a distinction between those genres that are immediately rooted in a social situation and those (such as literary genres) that have a more mediated relation to the social” (2007, 1630). The precise nature of this mediated relation can be further understood by an analysis of the role played by materiality in signaling genre. The zine is an excellent case study for this as it is a relatively stable media form that is used for a wide variety of content (Duncombe 1997). The media-specific properties of the zine, outlined below, provide a frame for understanding the content presented within. In referring to the zine as a “stable media form,” I am pointing to the status of the zine as a media object that sits at the center of dynamic, yet coherent, communities of writing and reading (Duncombe 1997; Kearney 2006; Piepmeier 2009; Radway 2011; Sinor 2003). While many scholars note that it is not possible, or desirable, to provide a definition of the zine that relies solely on its physical properties, the physical form and presentation of the zine has developed a level of stability— the majority taking the form of a photocopied text—because contemporary zine production relies on the uniquely accessible material affordances of the photocopier (see Eichhorn 2016). To consider how we might think about genre and materiality, I am going to take up one element of Frow’s explication of how genres work. One important way an individual text signals the particular genres that could be relevant to its interpretation is through framing: “Frames work to define the text against

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those things which it is not, cutting it off from the adjacent world; and to convey information from that adjacent world to the framed text. The frame belongs to both domains—both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’—and to neither” (Frow 2015, 115). Drawing on Genette’s theory of the paratext and Goffman’s theory of frame analysis, Frow argues that frames are thresholds that, for literary texts, both enclose the fictional space of the text and exclude the space of reality “against which the text is set” (116). As I discuss below, this understanding of frames has to be modified if it is to help us understand how autobiographical texts use material frames to encourage the reader to read the text as being in relation to reality by presenting an account of lived experience. The question of how the rich semiotic potential of paper and binding can be used for framing is hinted at but not discussed in detail by Frow.1 By referring to paper, binding, typography, and remediation using the photocopier as semiotic in this chapter, I point to how these materials—their affordances, and potential, also their tactility—contribute to the goal of making meaning about, or from, experience that is the purpose of autobiography. The importance of materiality to more subtle forms of semiosis is hinted at by Frow when he discusses how the material presentation of text functions as a “regulative frame” which “differentiates the genre of this text from other possible genres, alerts us to the way it works (its rhetorical function), and draws our attention towards some of its features and away from others” (10, emphasis in original). The example Frow cites is the presentation of a newspaper headline (“RAPE CASE JUDGE IN NEW STORM”) presented on “hoardings in the streets of Edinburgh” (6). The distinctive material features—the hoarding, the large typeset, the name of the newspaper—frame this text and allow the reader to interpret it as a “non-aesthetic text” (117). Frow suggests that the same text presented in an anthology of poetry would be read as poem, rather than news, because material frames “reinforce” the cues presented by formal textual features (9). Yet, as N. Katherine Hayles has argued, bracketing materiality as largely informational or as a factor that reinforces (rather than disrupts, reiterates, or expands) the linguistic components of a given work limits our ability to understand how aesthetic works are materially situated within “the zesty, contentious, and rapidly transforming media ecology of the new millennium” (2002, 7). How, then, might we produce a more comprehensive account of the role of materiality in framing genres in paper-based works of autobiography—a genre that has risen to prominence in the media ecology in the twenty-first century? We can begin such an investigation by considering how materiality and genre

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have been associated, often negatively, exemplified by the use of the term “paperback” as a synonym for genre fiction.

Materiality and genre In making discernments about the aesthetic value of a work, critics and readers have often drawn on the material components of a book. As Julie Rak (2013) observes in her study of memoir, “Most scholars who examine genre fiction connect it to the history of the paperback novel, which is how genre fiction such as romances, horror, Westerns, SF, thrillers, and mysteries were first produced” (19). Indeed “genre” (as a pejorative for literature produced for entertainment) and “paperback” have often been used as synonyms for forms of literature that lack aesthetic merit (Rak 2013, 20). These subtle but influential interpretations of the material frame, in this case the cheapness (or not) of the materials used to produce books for the mass market, are particularly important for understanding the “memoir boom”; where readers are engaged in making assessments of the truth-claims and reliability of the memoir’s author and narrator (Gilmore 2001; Rak 2013), and where memoir has been positioned as a low genre in the literary field (Rak 2004). Expanding on Philippe Lejeune’s (1989) influential formulation of the autobiographical pact as an agreement by the reader to interpret the text as having a particular kind of relationship to reality and the experience of the author, Rak argues that Lejeune emphasizes that autobiography is a manufactured product in the form of a physical book with a flyleaf and a cover. And the author is not just a writer, but also a producer who makes that object. The potential reader then evaluates the book paratextually—in that she or he has to think about the author’s name and the situation of the book in the world as well as the content within the book, because that information helps the reader to understand what kind of book this is. The material situating of the autobiographical pact is not just a test for typological purposes. It provides an active role for the potential reader, and it materializes the content of the autobiography as the work of a producer, not just an author. (2013, 25)

Rak’s reformulation of Lejeune’s oft-cited conceptualization of the pact reminds us of the nuanced and complex relationship between the implied author, the actual reader, and the subjectivity constructed within the text and that these

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relationships are, in the first instance, often enacted at the threshold of the material frame. The reader holds an autobiography in the bookstore or library, contemplating whether to read it. The materiality of the book participates in the framing of the text at this moment: Is the book a cheap paperback with a generic or indexical cover?2 Or is it a well-designed, high-quality paperback whose paper stock and typeface is pleasing? Is the book a hardcover, with dust-jacket, suggesting that it is intended for prosperity? The concept of the material frame developed in genre theory is useful for understanding the complex systems that are called on in forming a judgment in this moment because it allows us to consider the material aspect of the frames of reference the reader draws on in assessing the text, and how a text can suggest frames for its interpretation or have frames suggested by its use of specific materials, and placement in specific spaces.3 Zines are a compelling case for studying this because, unlike authors of books, the writers determine the material frame in which their text is presented.

Zines and the materiality of the frame Personal zines demonstrate the ubiquity of autobiography in contemporary culture and the powerful social uses to which it can be put (Poletti 2008a; Sinor 2003). Writers who are marginalized from, or consciously eschew, the spheres of professional cultural production are often the authors of zines (Duncombe 1997; Piepmeier 2009). The focus in the scholarship on zines has overwhelmingly focused on zines written by and for young women involved in third-wave feminism (Kearney 2006; Piepmeier 2009; Radway 2011; Sinor 2003), but scholars have also recognized the distinctive use of zines by queer writers (Brouwer 2005) and disability activists (Espi 2013). While zines are largely consistent in the material presentation (a booklet produced on a photocopier), their content is very diverse (Duncombe 1997). The materiality of the zine, then, is a relatively stable, but evolving, material frame in which an endless variety of texts are inscribed and read. Because zines are handmade, rather than mass produced, they offer writers a considerable amount of creative freedom in regard to material strategies. I have selected two examples that demonstrate that in their considered use of low-cost and ubiquitous materials such as paper bags and photocopiers, zine makers foreground the materiality of the frame to situate autobiography in ways that are distinctive and instructive for those of us seeking

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to develop a better understanding of how analog materials are deployed in acts of self-representation.

new beginnings: Confession by the light of digital media Presented as a quarter-size bound booklet, new beginnings is a series of dated entries, photographs, and screenshots spanning the month of June 2015 published by Bianca Martin.4 The writing style is that of the confession, a genre of emotional realism or authenticity presented as the search for “truth of the self and truth to the self ” (Brooks 2001, 9; emphasis in original). How this search for truth is narrated and offered to the reader as an authentic search is commonly understood in literary terms, yet as Peter Brooks (2001) and Susannah Radstone (2007) have noted, the discourse of confession in the law also shape the practices of modern confession. Like all autobiography, confession relies on and works within the split between the narrating I (the author) and the narrated I (the subject encountered in the text itself) (Radstone 2007, 32). new beginnings establishes and negotiates the relationship between these two subjectivities by constructing a material frame through the remediation of photographic self-portraits (selfies) represented in the increased contrast and density of the photocopied image. In Figure 6.1, we see three images that have been subjected to the flattening effect of the photocopier. The two self-portraits (selfies) reproduced in these pages are a material frame that establishes the “splitting of the central protagonist and the narrator” (Radstone 2007, 36) that is a hallmark of the confessional genre. The selfie is a practice and a product that visually splits the subject into a viewer

Figure 6.1 Detail from new beginnings zine, Bianca Martin (2015).

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and the viewed: The person captured in the selfie is, in the moment of being photographed, the protagonist who is then viewed by the reader and the narrator as the subject of the confessional narrative.5 The selfie on the left-hand page in Figure 6.1 is obscured, the photocopied image exaggerating the sharp contrast produced by the light source in the image and rendering the subject difficult to discern. As I have discussed elsewhere (Poletti 2008b, 91–101), this use of the photocopier to render images less legible is an example of how autobiographical zines often adopt a metacritical stance in relation to the presumed intimacy and access of confession. The remediated (Bolter and Grusin 2000) selfies in new beginnings explicitly, and visually, render the split between the narrator and the protagonist. The poor quality of the selfies reminds us of the distance between the lived experience and its representation in the confessional zine. The selfie is produced and circulated within a context of immediacy (Bolter and Grusin 2000). The remediation of the selfie from the circuits of digital distribution of social media into the circuit of distribution of the print zine is a gesture by Martin which heightens the zine’s claim to a connection to her lived experience (documented by the selfie and reflected on in the attendant narrative) while underscoring the mediated nature of that experience. The remediated selfie evokes lived experience, and the act of reflecting on that experience, while the framing of the zine underscores the removal of the selfie from its original context in networked digital media. This kind of autobiographical zine is a particularly stark example of a complex use of material frames to mediate the relationship between the inside and the outside of the text. The self-reflexivity of reminding the reader of the gap between experience and its medial frames through remediation is buttressed by other material strategies that offer the reader an experience of immediacy, authenticity, and intimacy (Bolter and Grusin 2000). This buttressing is vital so that the confession can achieve its aim “to evoke in the reader the experience of sharing in the confessant’s inward quest for selftransformation” (Radstone 2007, 36). This transformation is both the subject of the narrative and the effect of the confession: “The confession describes and performs the becomingness which constitutes its very heart” (Radstone 2007, 36). For Radstone, the becomingness of confession is rendered in the narrative through the protagonist’s relationship with temporality (the presentation of the narrative as motivated by the passing of time) and produced by the narrative’s reception by the reader: self-transformation occurs through the telling to a listener/reader (2007, 36–38).6

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new beginnings establishes its protagonist as “caught up in time’s forward trajectory” (Radstone 2007, 37) through the use of dated entries. The narrative weaves together chronologically dated vignettes regarding the unnamed narrator’s experience of the breakdown of a romantic relationship and her experiments with dating, the death of her father (who died “76 days” before the entry dated June 6), and her financial precarity.7 The relatively small pages are a limited physical frame for each vignette, each page narrating a single day in the month of June. The size of the zine frames the “forward trajectory” of time as intimate rather than monumental, and the confessional narrative is physically contained by the small zine that “encapsulates the details of everyday life, fitting the life inside the body [of the text] rather than the body inside the expansive temporality of life” (Stewart 1993, 40). There is considerable diversity in the materiality of each page/day: some are crowded and anarchic, with typographical diversity and multiple images, while others are stark and open. In the center of a black page—undated, but presented after June 20 and before June 22—sits a small piece of white paper which reads: “happy father’s day/i finally deleted my dead dad’s number from my phone” (unpag). Taken together, the bound pages materially frame the month in which the protagonist struggles with becoming a single woman whose father has died and with the possibility that these facts are the truth of the self. While the bound booklet of the zine is the material frame for the presentation of narrative time (the month of June), the becomingness of the confessant in new beginnings is also narrated and materially presented as embedded in the practices of mobile digital media. Along with selfies, the zine includes references to and remediated copies of tweets and text messages, and the paper zine acts as the material frame for a narrative about mobile digital communication. In Figure 6.1, the remediation of selfies is accompanied by the narrator’s confession that “on my way to my first date since you left me, I wanted to text you and tell you about it” (on the left) and “i took a post-sex selfie . . . and considered posting it online, because i still foolishly thought you cared” (on the right). These are two instances of a number of negated or furtive acts of mobile communication that are narrated in the zine, depicting the protagonist’s failed attempts to confess via digital media. The reasons for these failures vary: in the two examples above, the direct addressee of the text message and the intended viewer of the selfie are posited by the narrator as the ex-boyfriend who has abandoned the protagonist—the immediacy of the addressee inhibits the goal of confession as an act of becomingness because this confession is an attempt to overcome the

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personal truth the protagonist fears (“I’m the girl with the dead dad who got cheated on” the narrator observes on a later page). Framed by the booklet of the zine, mobile communication is cast as an inappropriate medium for confession, and in this sense new beginnings is bookish, as it engages the “media-specific properties of print illuminated by the light of the digital” (Pressman 2009, 466) through a combination of remediation and narrative. In this instance, the “light of the digital” is incorporated into the text at the level of narrative and the material frame in a way that confirms the importance of the materiality of a bound paper object as the container for the becomingness of the confession. As a nonnetworked, analog media form, the zine is a material frame that cuts off the act of confession “from the adjacent world” (Frow 2015, 115) of mobile communication, creating a freestanding (nonnetworked) material object within which the confession is located. At the level of form and content, this is juxtaposed with the mobile phone—the material frame for text messaging, Tweeting and so on—which inserts the confession within the flow of mediated personal communication. Thus new beginnings uses a bookish frame for the confession in order to establish the self-consciously literary project of the confession: drawing on the association of turning pages with the passing of time and using the boundedness of the codex as a container for a narrative.8 Importantly, the remediation of digital forms within this paper-frame communicates key elements of genre (the split between the narrator and the protagonist marked by the selfie) and presents an argument for the appropriateness of photocopy, paper and binding for the confessional narrative. Paper is situated as distinct from the networked digital media of the mobile phone. In the next example, we see more experimental use of the material frame to establish a threshold to the text that requires a more conscious engagement and negotiation by the reader. This zine requires a higher tolerance for a lack of knowing “what kind of text this is” before its use of genre is revealed, and suggests that the threshold is never left behind in the act of reading.

YOU: The frame as a point of no return Begun in 2002, YOU is a semi-anonymous zine released weekly that is produced by an artist who signs the project “Luke.”9 The physical presentation of the zine changes every week; however, its most common format is a hand-decorated

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Figure 6.2 An issue of YOU, Luke You, undated.

paper bag that has been sealed with staples. Inside the bag is a handwritten photocopied letter, usually of one page, that begins “Dear You.” Luke is the usual author of the letter; however, he often invites people to contribute a letter to the project and so the project includes a number of collaborators. Like most zines, YOU can be found in online distributors and dedicated zine stores; however, it is also distributed weekly by Luke in Melbourne Australia and by volunteers in other cities in Australia, North America, and New Zealand. YOU is not for sale: it is free, and left in small piles in stores that sell zines, zine libraries, music stores and, by Luke, in laundromats, community arts organizations, visual art supply stores, and other places he visits during the week.10 The encounter with YOU begins with the tactile experience of handling the paper bag, which is always stamped with the same stamp (“YOU”)—the title of the zine, a form of address, and an echo of the hail to discourse theorized by Althusser (“hey, you there!” (1971, 163)). The bag often includes additional

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decoration alongside the stamp, as in the example shown above where the paper bag has been painted with a variety of colors of spray paint. The letter that is inside is usually partially visible through the thin paper of the bag—the object is legible as a container for a piece of writing, thus inviting the person who sees or holds the bag to take up the position as a reader of that writing. However, the physical frame of the text—the bag—seals it inside and the would-be reader soon discovers that in order take up the position of reader they must remove the staples or tear the bag. Thus, unlike bound zines and books, YOU’s text cannot be casually browsed; it requires the negotiation of a purposefully sealed container, a physical threshold that must be negotiated. Moreover, negotiating the framing of the text is not without risk—who hasn’t caught their finger on a partially removed staple? Over the years I have handed out copies of YOU to groups of people, I have been amazed by the diversity of ways readers have negotiated the framing of the text. One colleague, a visual artist, quickly requested two copies of the zine so that she could open one and read it while keeping another copy in its pristine state. An English teacher at a professional development workshop eschewed the stapled side all together and approached the text from the opposite end of the bag, which is sealed with industrial glue. A student in a Master’s class dutifully set about removing each staple individually by hand, carefully removing it to avoid ripping the paper, while another tore the bag open immediately as if it were a bag of potato chips. The presentation of YOU as both a handmade object and a piece of writing is consistent with the way in which zines, particularly autobiographical zines, use the semiosis of the handmade paper object to position a reader as a unique recipient of a narrative (Poletti 2008a). YOU is distinctive, however, in that Luke has created a material frame for the text that requires each reader to solve the problem of accessing the text and in doing so the reader must irrevocably alter the integrity of the object. Whether or not one undertakes this work—picks up the paper bag from the pile in the laundromat, or zine library— will depend on whether or not the potential reader responds to the hail of the title, and is prepared to negotiate the ambiguity of the physical frame of the zine. Is that bag addressed to/addressing you? To pick up the bag and negotiate its seal is to accept the active role as a recipient of the text within. Each reader’s reaction to the frame situates their reading experience slightly differently: tearing the bag open with little interest in its decoration gives primacy to text over object, while carefully removing the staples to limit the damage wrought by the desire to read enacts an attempt to respect the work that has gone into decorating the bag.

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The hand-decorated paper bag is a material frame for the text that clearly establishes—and insists upon—the separation of the letter from the world. In this sense, it works as a frame in the way Frow describes; requiring the reader to physically negotiate the sealed paper bag heightens the experience of the frame as a threshold between the text and the world. However, a hand-decorated paper bag addressed to “you” does not clearly signal a genre. Unlike the memoirs studied by Rak (2013), which commonly state their genre through peritextual features such as being labeled “memoir” on their covers or shelved with memoirs in a bookstore or library, or zines such as new beginnings which include a peritextual label identifying the text as a “perzine,”11 YOU begins by inviting the reader to make a choice to read, and to invest some time in gaining access to the text by negotiating the material frame, without them really knowing what kind of text it is. Thus the crossing of the material threshold is prolonged, made into an action that must be consciously undertaken and, to a degree, planned by the reader. YOU foregrounds the material frame as a threshold between the world outside and inside the text and makes the crossing of that threshold a conscious act. Here, the material frame is not used, as Frow suggests (2015), to provide “information” (114) or “determinants” (117) which seal off the inside text from the outside: in this instance, the act of choosing to read involves a prolonged, and conscious, negotiation that extends the time the reader spends in the space between the world “inside” and the world “outside” the text.12 It is with the familiar epistolary address of “Dear” (which begins every issue) that clearly signals the genre of the work. With this use of the “strong structural conventions” (Jolly and Stanley 2005, 95) of the letter, the wholly unique experience of accessing the text through its material frame—the handdecorated paper bag—is (re)cast as opening a letter. The bag and its contents become legible as an epistle that “originate[s] from a ‘writing I’ (usually singular) and . . . [is] sent to a ‘reading I’ (usually but not invariably singular)” (ibid.). In negotiating the material frame the reader enacts their willingness to play the role of the reading I. Once the threshold has been negotiated and the role taken up, the letter itself implies that Luke is in the middle of a correspondence. Each letter implies an ongoing correspondence by launching into the recounting of a mundane occurrence in his everyday life (having a cold, riding his bicycle on a particularly wet afternoon) or the narration of singular events in Luke’s life (one issue detailed the birth of his daughter, years later another letter was written from the waiting room where Luke awaited a referral for a vasectomy). An individual issue of YOU implies an ongoing correspondence; a whole chain

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of letters from and to Luke of which an individual issue is but a small part.13 The material frame and the use of the genre of the letter work together to reinforce that autobiographical writing exists between the world of text and the world outside by nature of its claim to be writing drawn from lived experience.

Conclusion: The renewed importance of the material frame in a digital age Luke’s playful use of the material frame to engage his reader in an extended crossing of the physical threshold between reality and text is but one example of the renewed interest in the possibilities of paper and binding in zine culture. Alongside book artists, zine makers are among the most dedicated explorers and proponents of the semiotic power of paper and binding. While Stephen Duncombe concluded his 1997 study of zines concerned about their continued existence in a digital age, zine making is a perfect example of how the emergence of digital forms has reinvigorated the use of handwriting, paper and binding. By thinking about autobiographical zines through the lens of contemporary genre theory and the concept of the frame, the use of paper and binding to create a threshold and frame for autobiographical narrative can be appreciated as activities that are in some cases in dialogue with digital forms, and that celebrate the unique possibilities for engaging readers that paper and binding offer.

Notes 1 Frow (2015) acknowledges that many of the paratextual elements that frame a text “have to do with the material form of the book” (114). However, rather than considering the potential subtlety of the signifying potential of material frames, Frow characterizes features such as “the book’s size and format,” “binding,” “whether it has cut pages or not” as providing “information” (114) and “determinants” (117) rather than offering the open and evocative power he associates with linguistic frames. 2 On the issue of how covers frame autobiographical narratives, see Gillian Whitlock’s discussion of the role of memoir and the figure of the veiled woman on book covers in the “war on terror” in Soft Weapons, and Kate Douglas’s discussion of the child figure on the cover of memoirs of childhood in Contesting Childhood.

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3 On the subject of spaces as the material frame for memoir, see Rak (2013) and Whitlock (2007) on bookstores. 4 The zine was originally published anonymously, but Bianca Martin has given permission for her name to be used in this chapter. 5 See Senft and Baym’s definition of the selfie: “First and foremost, a selfie is a photographic object that initiates the transmission of human feeling in the form of a relationship (between photographer and photographed, between image and filtering software, between viewer and viewed, between individuals circulating images, between users and social software architectures, etc.). A selfie is also a practice—a gesture that can send (and is often intended to send) different messages to different individuals, communities, and audiences. This gesture may be dampened, amplified, or modified by social media censorship, social censure, misreading of the sender’s original intent, or adding additional gestures to the mix, such as likes, comments, and remixes” (2015, 1589). See also Paul Frosh’s discussion of the selfie as “a ‘genre of personal reflexivity’” (2015, 1621). 6 new beginnings includes a confessional narrative regarding the protagonist’s dating and casual sex, strengthening its use of the confessional genre. See Radstone’s discussion of the importance of narratives of sexuality to the genre of the confession (2007, 38–39). 7 An example of how these narratives are interconnected can be found in the handwritten entry dated 14/6/2015: “My psychologist is trying to encourage me to embrace my grief, but instead all I feel is anger. My chest gets tight and I feel like I can’t breathe. I’ve been tricked, and I’ve been made a fool. Everyone is laughing at me behind by my back. Nobody wants to talk because I’m the girl with the dead dad who got cheated on. I feel like everyone knew but me. I’m scared to go out, I’m scared to talk to anyone. I’m so angry at myself. I’m so angry at him. I pay my psychologist with my credit card and get an overdrawn fee.” 8 That the zine shares the codex form with the book is relevant here, and can be linked to Patricia Crain’s arguments regarding the associations between books, reading, and the development of the self (2013). I thank Jessica Pressman for this observation. 9 I use the term semi-anonymous here as Luke is an active member of the zine community in Australia, and is also well known for his long involvement with Sticky Institute (the zine space in Melbourne, Australia). The identity of the maker of YOU is a kind of “open secret” to those who are frequent readers of zines and who attend zine events. When Luke makes appearances as the maker of YOU at zine events, workshops, or artist residencies, he wears a mask to obscure his identity. When a reading of the zine takes place, multiple people (of different genders) read an issue of the zine as “Luke.” The melding of these playful performances of anonymity and the surprisingly consistent production of a new zine once every week for over a decade suggest that the YOU project is an amalgamation of performance art and publishing.

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10 Thus, Luke varies that spatial frame in which the zine is encountered. When I first read the zine, I picked it up in a pub in Melbourne where it had been lying alongside the free newspapers which advertise local music, art exhibitions, and theater performances. Framed by these publications, the letter was particularly surprising. I thank Kári Driscoll for prompting this observation. 11 “Perzine” is a portmanteau of “personal” and “zine” which denotes an autobiographical zine. It is a widely used term for designating genre in North American and Australian zine communities. 12 We might also say that Luke’s transformation of the paper bag into a material threshold that must be crossed “gives rise” (Derrida 1987a, 9) to the zine as a literary work in the sense that the threshold is never left behind—the reader never fully moves into the world of the work itself. 13 In this sense, YOU could be said to evoke an epistolarium (Stanley 2011, 137)—a whole world of correspondence made up of the letters that are visible (in this case, a single issue of the zine), the letters that no longer exist but are implied through the available letters, the letters received from correspondents, and “ur-letters” (published versions of the letters). Luke produced a collection of “ur-letters” in 2008 when he published the anthology YOU: Some letters from the first five years. Stanley’s theorization of the epistolarium differs fundamentally from Derrida’s influential theory of the letter (1987b) as being marked by absence and mourning by thinking of letters—both real and implied—as chains of presence.

Works cited Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster, 121–73. London: New Left Books. Andrejevic, Mark. 2004. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Armitstead, Claire. 2001. “My Life as a Story.” The Guardian, January 27. https://www. theguardian.com/books/2001/jan/27/biography Berlant, Lauren. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brooks, Peter. 2001. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brouwer, Daniel C. 2005. “Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22: 351–71. doi:10.1080/07393180500342860 Couldry, Nick. 2008. “Mediatization or Mediation? Alternative Understandings of the Emergent Space of Digital Storytelling.” New Media and Society 10 (3): 373–91. doi:10.1177/1461444808089414

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Crain, Patricia. 2013. “Reading Childishly? A Codicology of the Modern Self.” In Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era. Edited by N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, 155–82. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1980. “The Law of Genre.” Translated by Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 55–81. doi:10.1086/448088 Derrida, Jacques. 1987a. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1987b. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated, with an Introduction and Additional Notes, by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Kate. 2010. Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Duncombe, Stephen. 1997. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. New York: Verso. Eichhorn, Kate. 2016. Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Espi, Sara Rosa. 2013. “Writing Dyslexia.” Image & Narrative 14 (3): 45–56. Frosh, Paul. 2015. “The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory, and Kinesthetic Sociability.” International Journal of Communication 9: 1607–28. http:// ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3146/1388 Frow, John. 2007. “‘Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need’: Genre Theory Today.” PMLA 122 (5): 1626–34. doi:10.1632/pmla.2007.122.5.1626 Frow, John. 2015. Genre. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. “Limit-Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdictions of Identity.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 24 (1): 128–39. doi:10.1353/ bio.2001.0011 Hayles, N. Katherine. 2002. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jolly, Margaretta and Stanley, Liz. 2005. “Letters as / not a Genre.” Life Writing 2 (2): 91–118. doi:10.1080/10408340308518291 Kearney, Mary Celeste. 2006. Girls Make Media. New York: Routledge. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. “The Autobiographical Pact.” In On Autobiography. Translated by Katherine Leary, edited by Paul John Eakin, 3–30. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lejeune, Philippe. 2009. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, translated by Katherine Durnin. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. Luke. 2008. YOU: Some Letters from the First Five Years. Melbourne: Breakdown Press. Martin, Bianca. n.d. new beginnings. Miller, Carolyn R. 1984. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (2): 151–67. doi:10.1080/00335638409383686 Piepmeier, Alison. 2009. Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York: New York University Press.

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Poletti, Anna. 2008a. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Poletti, Anna. 2008b. “Auto/assemblage: Reading the Zine.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 31 (1): 85–102. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23540922 Pressman, Jessica. 2009. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (4): 465–82. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ spo.act2080.0048.402 Radstone, Susannah. 2007. The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory. London: Routledge. Radway, Janice. 2011. “Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change.” PMLA 126 (1): 140–50. doi:10.1632/pmla.2011.126.1.140 Rak, Julie. 2004. “Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity.” Genre 37 (3–4): 483–504. doi:10.1215/00166928-37-3-4-483 Rak, Julie. 2013. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Renov, Michael. 2008. “First-person Films: Some Theses on Self-Inscription.” In Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices. Edited by Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong, 39–50. New York: Open University Press. Sanneh, Kelefa. 2011. “The Reality Principle: The Rise and Rise of a Television Genre.” The New Yorker, May 9. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/09/thereality-principle Senft, Theresa M. and Baym, Nancy K. 2015. “What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon.” International Journal of Communication 9: 1588–1606. http:// ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4067/1387 Sinor, Jennifer. 2003. “Another Form of Crying: Girl Zines as Life Writing.” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 26 (1–2): 240–64. doi:10.1080/0144035032000235909 Smith, Sidonie and Watson, Julia. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd edition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Stanley, Liz. 2011. “The Epistolary Gift, the Editorial Third-Party, Counter Epistolaria: Rethinking the Epistolarium.” Life Writing 8 (2): 135–52. doi:10.1080/14484528.201 1.559732 Stewart, Susan. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster. Whitlock, Gillian. 2007. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yagoda, Ben. 2009. Memoir: A History. New York: Riverhead Books.

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Doing Things with Literature in a Digital Age: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and the Material Turn in Literary Studies Liedeke Plate

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—“I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone. Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally. . . . Adjust the light so you won’t strain your eyes. Do it now, because once you’re absorbed in reading there will be no budging you. Make sure the page isn’t in shadow, a clotting of black letters on a gray background, uniform as a pack of mice; but be careful that the light cast on it isn’t too strong, doesn’t glare on the cruel white of the paper, gnawing at the shadows of the letters as in a southern noonday. Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best. (Calvino 1983, 9)

Thus opens (the English translation of) Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, first published in 1979

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(English translation: 1981) and widely read as a postmodernist novel, its metafictional self-reflexivity exposing parodic playfulness, postmodern depthlessness, and the end of grand narratives. The play with literary form and the conventions of narrative start, here, with the recognition of reading as an embodied, situated, social, and material practice—a practice that is historically located, moreover, as Calvino’s observation that “In the old days they used to read standing up, at a lectern” (9) attests, as well as the reference to the noise produced by the TV in the next room. However much readers about to begin reading Calvino’s novel have recognized themselves in the mirror the text holds up to them in its opening paragraphs—no reader, after all, can escape the material, physical dimensions of the act of reading as an embodied activity —the reception history and the interpretations of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler have focused on its textual play of signification. The many studies devoted to its discussion of reading focus on the act or event of reading as an intellectual, cognitive, or imaginative activity, using it to argue the much-debated issue of the reader’s autonomy versus the writer’s authority (e.g., Salvatori 1986) brought to the forefront of literary studies by French poststructuralist theory (notably, Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” 1986a) and German reader-response theory (e.g., Iser 1978; Jauss 1982), or analyzing its inscription of the role of the reader in the text and examining especially its use of the second-person pronoun (e.g., Gesuato 1997; Malmgren 1986; Rankin 1986; Zima 2004). Despite Calvino’s novel’s many references to reading as a social and embodied activity and to the materiality of literature—indeed, despite its use of the word “reading” as a metaphor for careful attentiveness to a human other in the act of lovemaking,1 a metaphorical use that meticulously details the material and sensory dimensions of this “systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds” (123)—so far, the scholarship on the novel has mostly evaded the question of materiality in literary culture. This is perhaps not surprising. Unlike other works discussed in this book, Calvino’s does not flaunt its materiality. Textually and diegetically experimental, it is not so artifactually but, rather, a conventional codex. In addition, the dominant paradigm in the humanities in general, and in literary criticism and theory in particular, for the past fifty years has been that of the “linguistic turn,” a paradigm centered on the reading of texts, with “reading” understood as

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the semiotic “decoding” (Hall 1980), analysis, and interpretation of a material culture (and world) understood as text, that is, as a signifying system.2 In contrast to the linguistic paradigm’s “antimaterial conception of culture and society” (Olsen 2013 (2010), 3), this chapter embraces the “material turn” and explores the methodological value of studying materiality for illuminating book presence in a digital age and thus reinvigorating the study of literature in the twenty-first century. The focus, here, then, is on a materially unremarkable, as it were “normal” book that predates the ubiquitous computing that has become the hallmark of the so-called digital age. Yet, as N. Katherine Hayles already observed, the narrative and self-reflexivity of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler speak to a sense of materiality “as if it knows it has a physical body and fears that its body is in jeopardy from a host of threats” (1999, 41). As such, it reminds us that materiality is not just a feature of certain—experimental—books, but of all of them.3 In this chapter, I propose to use If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler as point of departure for a discussion of the material turn in literary studies and what new avenues it opens up, not just for studying artifactually experimental works, but also for the more conventional ones. We seem, indeed, to be at a turning point, when after a series of turns (the cultural turn, the visual turn, the spatial turn, and the performative turn, to name a few), a new and major turn is taking place in the humanities and social sciences. As I wish to argue, the material turn represents a significant paradigm shift. Building on the previous turns and encompassing them, it entails a thorough rethinking of the nature of being (ontology) and of the ethics of knowledge. An “ethico-onto-epistemological project,” then, as Elizabeth St. Pierre, Alecia Jackson, and Liza Mazzei put it (2016, 100; see also Barad 2003), the material turn is an ethical project that has far-reaching theoretical and methodological implications. Following a brief outline of the material turn, I will then focus on its implications for literary studies. Specifically, I will address the need to (re-)materialize literary studies from several different angles, discussing the lack of a language to speak of the materiality of reading and the resulting impoverishment of sense experience, the reduction of a multisensory experience to a mental activity, and the ensuing neglect of the act of reading’s many and diverse social and cultural meanings. Briefly touching upon the social things people do with literature, I conclude by suggesting that literary scholars must inquire into such matters if they want to fully grasp what is—and was—literature.4

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Empirical oblivion5 There is a growing literature in cultural studies and the social sciences acknowledging the importance of things (object, artifacts) to social life and practice: in philosophy (Graham 2002; Bryant 2011; Bogost 2012), science and technology studies (Law and Hassard 1999; Mol 2002; Latour 2005), in the study of lived religion (Houtman and Meyer 2012) and of cultural memory (Munteán, Plate, and Smelik 2017), to name just a few of the domains in which the material turn is making an impact. This interest in things forms a corrective to the “kind of collective amnesia in social and cultural studies” to which things seem to have been subjected throughout the twentieth century, leaving us, in the words of Bjørnar Olsen, “with a paradoxically persistent image of societies operating without the mediation of objects” (2). As he points out in the introduction to In Defense of Things, throughout the past century, societies and cultures have by and large been treated “as collectives of humans held together by social relations and social forces—in short, by people without things” (5; emphasis in the original). The “new materialist” interest in things leads to a reevaluation of the relationship between people and things, both of whom are now seen as important to social life and practice and thus as codependent, collaborating or “intra-acting” (Barad 2003), their lives “entangled” (Hodder 2012) and forming a “meshwork” (Ingold 2010).6 As the new materialist scholars point out, if things need us, we also need them; it is hard to imagine what humans would be without any things at all, and there is a strong sense in which what makes us “human” is, paradoxically, our dependence on (nonhuman) things. Without things, people as it were amount to nothing. The idea that “stuff matters,” as Daniel Miller aptly puts it (2010, 125), which fuels new and innovative research in the humanities and social sciences capable of responding to the challenges posed by the posthuman condition in the twentyfirst century (cf. Braidotti 2013), is a trend with multiple sources and faces that finds an echo in the growing public interest, in part because of climate change, in how the natural world is entangled with social practices. In the words of Bill Brown, who introduced literary and cultural scholars to “A Sense of Things” (as the title of his 2003 book reads), we care so much about things today because “our most precious [thing], the earth, is dying” (Brown 2010). Taking a pause, then, from the relentless march of “progress,” relocating “man” amid natural forces and other things, the new materialisms are both anti-anthropocentric and anti-Cartesian. They reject the centuries-old model of man as the measure of all

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things and as “a rational animal endowed with language” (Braidotti 2013, 143) to substitute a model of “radical relationality” (144) for it: non-unitary subjects with multiple allegiances and enmeshed in complex, human and nonhuman, entanglements. In so doing, new materialisms also seek to counter what St. Pierre et al. have termed “the devastating dividing practices of the dogmatic Cartesian image of thought” (2016, 99). Cartesianism, indeed, Cartesian dualism, is founded “on faith in the grammar of the subject/object distinction” (102). As feminist scholars have long argued, the binary oppositions that structure Western thought—for example, self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, thought/feeling, transcendence/immanence, white/black, subject/object, human/nonhuman—and which are rooted in Descartes’s privileging of thought (rationality) over matter (cf. Cixous 1975; Collins 1993; Van den Hengel 2018) have extremely harmful and destructive effects, not only for the unprivileged term of the binary (woman, black, nature, nonhuman, object, etc.) but also for its privileged hegemonic one, as scholars in masculinity studies among others have pointed out (cf. Connell 1995; Beynon 2002; Plate 2018). In this sense, the structure of language that assumes that “I” precedes and therefore initiates “think” may really be “a bad habit” and an error on Descartes’s and his followers’ part (cf.  Damásio 1994). Indeed, whereas subject and verb are not separate in the Latin formulation of his famous aphorism, cogito ergo sum, they are so in his original phrasing in Discours de la méthode (2000 (1637)), “je pense, donc je suis.” Just as soccer players, for instance, know it is the ball that does the work, determining the movement of the player, and musicians know it is they who are as it were “being played” by their instruments, so St. Pierre et al. write: Perhaps thought is not initiated by the “I” but comes to the “I” from the world. Perhaps the “I” is not even separate from the verb or the object of the verb in the sentence, “I am running in the road.” Perhaps “I,” “running,” and “road” only exist together—irunroad—in a spatiotemporal relation without distinctions. (103)

Speaking of materiality, then, defined as the relations between people and things (cf. Munteán, Plate, and Smelik 2017, 3), and so giving things their due, is a profoundly ethical, feminist, and posthumanist project. By acknowledging the agency of things,7 that is, by recognizing that things do things to us—as Miller explains, “Objects don’t shout at you like teachers, or throw chalk at you as mine did, but they help you gently to learn how to act appropriately” (2010, 53) and

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this obviously also applies to books: your copy of Calvino’s novel requires you hold it in your hands, or prop it up if you want to free your hands, or place it “upside down” if you opt for reading it standing “on your hands, head down, in the yoga position,” as Calvino jokingly suggests (1983, 9)—and reconceiving of our interactions with them in terms of human-nonhuman collaborations, new materialist scholarship responds to the call for socially relevant academic research by contributing to helping “humanity to re-invent itself affirmatively, through creativity and empowering ethical relations” (Braidotti 2013, 195). Recognizing material culture as a crucial dimension of cultural and social life is also a “new empiricist” project. Attention to materiality entails empiricism. In this sense, “Empiricism and materialism go hand in hand” (St. Pierre et al. 2016, 99). To rethink the role of things in social life is to attend to them in their concrete, material, and physical dimensions. Unlike the old empiricisms, however, this new empiricism conceives of matter as “vibrant” (Bennett 2010) rather than inert and passive; indeed, as having “agency” reconceived not as a human attribute, but as a doing or being—the capacity “not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett 2010: viii). Therefore, as St. Pierre et al. have convincingly argued, the empirical and the material “must change together” (2016, 99). As they write, “With those changes comes a rethinking of ontology, which considers the nature of being and the basic categories of existence . . . as well as the nature of human being. As we rethink matter, we must rethink the empirical (about knowledge) and ontology (about being), and the classic division between the two begins to break down” (99). In what follows, I explore what this rethinking entails for literature and literary studies. As I wish to suggest, new materialism opens new ways to rethink the materiality of texts both old and new.

Back to the work: The material turn in literary studies Empirical oblivion has dominated literary studies for the longest time. Literary theories, analyses, and interpretations have concentrated on texts, defined as linguistic artifacts, looking into their aesthetic, social, and semiotic dimensions, more often than not paying little to no attention to the material form in which these texts came to us. This happened under the programmatic banner of Roland Barthes’s “From Work to Text,” which in the early 1970s announced a

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new object as a result of an epistemological shift set in motion by Marxism, Freudianism, and Structuralism: the Text. In sketching the contours of this new object of “literary science,” Barthes sets up a distinction between “work” and “text,” explaining that “the work is a fragment of substance, it occupies a portion of the spaces of books (for example, in a library). The Text is a methodological field . . . the work is held in the hand, the text is held in language” (1986b, 57). Barthes’s aim in this essay and its precursor piece “The Death of the Author” was to counter the biographic approach that dominated literary studies in his days, detaching the work from its author’s life and presumed intentions, allowing instead more power to the reader as the one actualizing the text’s play of signification. In doing so, however, Barthes may have tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The anti-authoritarianism which transpires in his refusal “to respect the manuscript and the author’s declared intentions” (1986b, 61; emphasis in the original)—even questioning the legitimacy of the so-called author’s rights (ibid.; see also Plate 2011, 60–63)—combined with his distaste for the increasing consumerism of his day to construe things as passive, inert, and bad. “The work is ordinarily the object of consumption” (Barthes 1986b, 62), he writes in a sentence that denigrates consumption as a lower social and cultural activity while reproducing the (structuralist and Cartesian) distinction between subject and object that reasserts the former’s ascendency while denying the latter vitality and agency. As he proclaims, in his theory of the text, “no vital ‘respect’ is therefore due to the Text: it can be broken” (1986b, 61; emphasis in the original). In contrast, I suggest we go back to the work. Not the old work of preBarthesian times, to be sure, but a “new” work: a work whose materiality, in line with the ethico-onto-epistemology of the new materialisms, matters, and whose vital role in structuring social, cultural, and aesthetic life is recognized and acknowledged. In this context, reading becomes a performance in which the text’s medium or material support is not incidental but a potential agent; a material practice that recognizes the reader and the work—literally, reading matter—as co-constitutive and productive not only of “the text” as neurological-imaginative construct but as a material-discursive event (cf. Hayles 2005). Much, indeed, has been lost in literary studies’ forgetting of the material dimensions of literary production and reception. It is the accomplishment of N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman (2013) to have made the medium’s materiality central to what they have termed “comparative textual media,” a new field that takes its point of departure in the recognition that print is itself a medium and that proposes to consider print in a comparative context with other textual media. Here I want

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to focus on four consequences of empirical oblivion: first, the lack of a language to speak of the materiality of reading; second, the resulting impoverishment of sense experience; third, the reduction of a multisensory experience to a mental activity; and fourth, the ensuing neglect of the act of reading’s polysemous social and cultural meanings. To retrieve these material dimensions of reading for literary scholarship and elaborate a material literary studies approach has profound methodological implications, which I delineate below.

Reading as a multisensory skill? Unlike bookmakers and book historians, for instance, literary scholars have by and large neglected to cultivate the language to speak about the material and sensory aspects of books.8 As history of the book scholars have been showing for a while now (e.g., Mak 2011; but see also Kirschenbaum 2006 and Hawkins 2006), this incapacity to speak of the qualities of the paper, binding, and fonts, among other things, as they affect not just sight but also the proximal senses of touch and smell, leads to their being overlooked as integral to the event of reading and therefore a source of knowledge and of aesthetic experience (Marks 2008). The point has been made that the advent of e-books and e-readers has brought the text’s material support back into view, not just making readers think about the difference between reading on a tablet computer or from a book, but also occasioning “bookish,” paper-based multimodal literature (Pressman 2009; Hayles 2013; Brillenburg 2013). Such books, which are made possible by the availability of ever-cheaper technologies for printing images and word-image combinations, foreground their material dimensions. As Jonathan Safran Foer states apropos of his die-cut book Tree of Codes (2010), “‘This is a book that remembers it has a body.’ When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body” (qtd. in Wagner 2010). Like the artist’s book whose aesthetics they appropriate for a mass market, multimodal works from Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) to J. J. Abrams’s and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013), and including Foer’s above-mentioned Tree of Codes, expose the need for a language to speak of the material, sensory, and affective aspects of the work and elucidate the materiality of reading. Anticipating such works, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler addresses precisely this issue, though not through any artifactual experimentation of its own—its use of ink, paper, binding, etc. indeed is quite conventional—but in its narrative,

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which is about literature as a “made object” and a “textual thing” (Kirschenbaum 2006, 155), subject to printers’ mistakes and to the whims (and creativity) of readers, such as Irnerio, who makes “things with books . . . objects. Yes, artworks: statues, pictures, whatever you want to call them. .  .  . I fix the books with mastic, . . . I carve them, I make holes in them” (119). In the opening paragraphs of Chapter 3, Calvino first describes a now mostly obsolete practice, which is that of cutting the pages of an unopened book; a book, that is, whose leaves are still joined at the folds, not slit apart: The pleasures derived from the use of a paper knife are tactile, auditory, visual, and especially mental. Progress in reading is preceded by an act that traverses the material solidity of the book to allow you access to its incorporeal substance. Penetrating among the pages from below, the blade vehemently moves upward, opening a vertical cut in a flowing succession of slashes that one by one strike the fibers and mow them down—with a friendly and cheery crackling the good paper receives that first visitor, who announces countless turns of the pages stirred by the wind or by a gaze—then the horizontal fold, especially if it is double, opposes great resistance, because it requires an awkward backhand motion—there the sound is one of muffled laceration, with deeper notes. The margin of the pages is jagged, revealing its fibrous texture; a fine shaving—also known as “curl”—is detached from it, as pretty to see as a wave’s foam on the beach. Opening a path for yourself, with a sword’s blade, in the barrier of pages becomes linked with the thought of how much the word contains and conceals: you cut your way through reading as if through a dense forest. (Calvino 1983, 38)

Aside from the sexual overtones already highlighted by Teresa de Lauretis in her feminist critique of the novel (1987; 70–83; see especially 77), what is striking in Calvino’s description here is its highly metaphorical nature. It suggests that the experience—the metaphor’s tenor—can only be described in terms of something else: the vehicle. While there is reference to a specific, technical language of books in the explanation that the fine shaving that detaches itself from the page is called curl, on the whole, the passage is dominated by metaphorical thinking and imagery, as in the curl which resembles a wave’s foam, the paper knife which becomes a sword’s blade, and the book which is likened to a barrier of pages. Hinting at, if not a lack of an existing language, then at least a lack of knowledge of this language among the novel’s readers, the passage also suggests an impoverishment of sense experience.9 Indeed, Calvino’s metaphorical flourishes imply profoundly physical and affective experiences and great effort. On the one hand, the exaggerations underscore the material dimensions of the act of paper

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cutting that accompanies the reading of unopened books, as well as the material aspects of the book itself, for instance in the “fibrous texture” of the paper page, its resistance and response to the blade of the paper knife, and the sound that emerges from the encounter. The materials of the book and their qualities are recognized to form an integral part of the experience, as Calvino describes the “friendly and cheery crackling” of “the good paper” and the fibers struck and mown by the paper knife—these latter metaphors emphasizing the quality of the paper and of the cellulose pulp of which it is made while suggesting it is derived of grasses, a history of the book’s materials at odds with the metaphor of the forest used at the end of the passage, which evokes rather a provenance from wood. On the other hand, aggrandizing those taken-for-granted and unexamined material activities that form an integral part of the act of reading, the metaphors also counter what Miller has termed “the humility of things” (2010, 50), that is, the idea that things do their work unnoticed and unremarked upon, suggesting the need to recognize and acknowledge that work instead. Although we all know there are experiences for which there are no words, it is clear that not being able to express them is also integral to how oblivion and ignorance are culturally and socially produced (cf. Proctor and Schiebinger 2008; Plate 2016). Calvino’s use of metaphors simultaneously reveals a need to have, find, or develop a language to speak of the materiality of reading while offering possibilities for doing so. All language, after all, is in a sense metaphorical, and words once used metaphorically may increasingly become literal, as must have been the case for “curl,” which was initially used for a lock of hair of a spiral or convolute form but soon was applied to anything of a similar spiral or incurved shape. A vocabulary serves to make things present in a material-discursive way (cf. Barad 2003), enriching language and extending its possibilities for conveying sensory knowledge. Acknowledging reading to be a multisensory experience, Calvino’s passage quoted above also counterbalances the reduction of reading to a mental activity, insisting it is a material-discursive and sensory-cognitive activity instead.10 As scholars working on the senses have been arguing, there is a hierarchy of the senses in Western culture, with the distance senses (i.e., vision and hearing) valued as the higher and the proximal ones dismissed as inferior (Marks 2008). Not to recognize the proximal senses as vehicles of knowledge and of beauty, among other things, entails an impoverishment of knowledge and of sense experience. According to Laura Marks, “We need to revisit the sensory hierarchy—while trying to retain the capacity for aesthetic judgement, knowledge, and ethics

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associated with the ‘higher’ senses” (2008, 123). This is because, as she explains, building on the work of Jacques Rancière, “sense experience operates [as] a membrane between the sensible and the thinkable” (ibid.). It is integral to the “distribution of the sensible,” which conditions “what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made, or done” (Rancière 2010 (2004), 85). Bringing the material turn to literary studies then aims to effect a “redistribution of the sensible” with regard to social practices of reading and the materiality of literature. Finally, the reduction of reading to an affective-cognitive activity has entailed the neglect of the act of reading’s polysemous social and cultural meanings for the individual engaging in the act of reading. In her groundbreaking Reading the Romance, Janice Radway already explored what women were really doing when they were reading romances, arguing that for the women she interviewed, the event of reading functions as “a complex intervention in the ongoing social life of actual social subjects” (1984, 7), for example, signaling temporary unavailability to their families or signifying time for themselves. More recently, Deborah O’Keefe pointed out that the act of reading in itself is gendered, and that when they read, girls enact femininity: “Girls as a group were always more involved than boys were in reading, an activity that is girlish in that it earns approval from one’s elders and requires sitting still for long periods of time” (2016, 26). The meaning of literary texts thus cannot be reduced to the texts’ play of signification, but must include the ways in which people perform social and cultural meanings through them. These performative, social meanings are attested by, among other things, the blurb on the back cover of Seth GrahameSmith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), whose last sentence reads, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you’d actually want to read.” Followed by the statement, “JANE AUSTEN is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and other masterpieces of English literature. SETH GRAHAME-SMITH once took a class in English literature,” the blurb suggests fun while rejecting “masterpieces” and “literature.” On Thinkgeek.com, an American online retailer catering to computer enthusiasts and other self-identified “geeky” people, the book is promoted as “a remix of the Jane Austin [sic] novel you were forced to read.” The oppositional, countercultural stance, also expressed in the promotional statement that “this isn’t your English Teacher’s copy of Pride and Prejudice” makes clear that the meanings of the book and of the act of reading it are social and cultural and affective, and that what people are doing when they are reading

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is not just deciphering the meaning of the words on the page, but also performing social identity and their relationship to cultural authority. Likewise, by identifying themselves as Austenites, fans of Jane Austen signal their position on, among other things, romantic love and gender relations. Merchandise becomes part of how Austenites express themselves and make their position known: band aids decorated with the image of Jane Austen enables the expression of a delicate sensibility in the dressing of minor wounds, while the use of a “sensibly scented” Jane Austen Air Freshener “shows you appreciate romance and dislike the smell of peasants” (as the novelty dealer Archie McPhee puts it on its website).11 Thoroughly commercial, such uses of literature are material as well as pragmatic, materializing book presence as integral to consumer culture. People indeed do various things with literature and with books (cf. Price 2012)—material things as well as social things—and these things, in turn, do things to people: they shape their sense of self, inform their ideas about the world, and orient their actions in it.

Conclusion: Taking things seriously As Pierre Bayard wittily and provocatively made clear in his Comment parler des livres que l’on a pas lus? (2007; How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, 2007), reading is a fuzzy concept, and may refer to “a variety of practices” (Bayard 2007: xvi). The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry on the verb “to read” confirms this breadth of meaning and attendant fuzziness as it gives a series of definitions, which range from paying very close attention to words and letters to a quick skim of a text, from perusing a book or studying a periodical, poring over and scrutinizing its pages, to scanning, skimming, thumbing, or flipping through them. Importantly, whereas the OED includes references to the reading materials as object of the act of reading, and thus acknowledges reading to be a material practice involving not just a brain but also a body and reading matter— involving, that is, writing, books, printed matter, etc.—its definitions nonetheless limit themselves to viewing reading as a cognitive activity. In contrast, in this chapter I have proposed that we understand the act of reading as a material practice and an embodied activity that is also a social and historical practice. Suggesting we take things seriously, then, I in effect propose to move beyond the dematerialized conception of the text that has dominated literary studies for the past decades, what may be called “the textual fallacy.” Literary studies focused on

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a dematerialized understanding of the text plead guilty to the marginalization and stigmatization of things in literary culture: most notably, books. It also pleads guilty to reducing a multisensory experience to a purely mental activity, in effect marginalizing affect, the proximal senses, and their different ways of knowing.12 In contrast, by taking things seriously, a new materialist approach to literature is not only an ethical gesture that gives things their dues. Acknowledging the many manifestations of book presence today, such an approach also recognizes literature as integral to social life both in the ways people do things with it and in the ways it does things with them. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler acknowledges the social dimensions of reading by making the plot of his book revolve around the (diegetic) relationships between the characters as readers (and nonreaders) as their lives are entangled with and through books and reading. Drawing the (extradiegetic, real-life) reader of his work into this meshwork through its second-person address, the novel in its closing sentence allows for the fictional world and the act or event of reading to coincide, thereby creating a hybrid, heterotopic space in which the reader becomes conscious of the material dimensions of reading and of the entanglement of human bodies and reading materials. Foregrounding the materiality of reading, Calvino’s novel in its concrete materialization, for instance, as my old and yellowed paperback copy, invites a reading that takes things seriously, which in the end means nothing more nor less than that the “act of reading” in all its pluriformity is to be taken performatively and as a social performance. To fully account for book presence in a digital age, we need to unravel the social and affective meanings reading (and specific books and genres) hold for people.

Notes 1 And vice versa, as I shall discuss further on: the novel also describes reading as a sexual act. 2 A notable example is Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957), in which he reads material culture as text through its representations, from the Citroën DS to the shopping net bag filled with produce. 3 As Matthew Kirschenbaum points out, “Language and literature are phenomena embodied by made objects, actual things” (2006, 155). 4 I am, of course, not the only one to make such an argument; nor is this the first place I do so. Generally, my argument follows N. Katherine Hayles’s, namely that “even print texts cannot escape being affected by information technologies”

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Book Presence in a Digital Age (1999, 43) and the insight that electronic digital computing brought the text’s material support back into view, revealing how “the materiality of books has been a neglected area in literary studies and the reception of literary works” (Plate 2015, 95). I borrow the phrase “empirical oblivion” from St. Pierre et al. (2016, 107). Its resonances with my notion of “amnesiology” (Plate 2016), that is, the study of the cultural production of oblivion, gesture toward questions about the forgetting of things in culture, which I cannot enter into here. As St. Pierre et al. observe, “The descriptor ‘new’ does not necessarily announce something new but serves as an alert that we are determined to try to think differently” (2016, 100). For a summary of the debate about the “agency” of objects, see Munteán, Plate, and Smelik (2017, 12–16). Sydney Shep advocates “learning from things” through creative research precisely to “enrich our language of bibliographical description” (2006, 40). See also Lomme (2016). This chimes with recent work in ecocriticism, especially Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks (2015), in which he collects obscure and near-forgotten words for the landscape around the British Isles as a work of memory, his argument being that the erosion of distinctions between things and the lack of a rich vocabulary to describe the natural world goes hand in hand with its destruction in reality. Interestingly, the online marketplace for books AbeBooks offers a glossary of book terms designed to help visitors to their website understand unfamiliar book-related terms, showing there is a need for such a vocabulary when buying and selling especially secondhand, older and/or rare books. See “AbeBooks’ Glossary of Book Terms,” http:// www.abebooks.com/books/RareBooks/collecting-guide/understanding-rare-books/ glossary.shtml. One might also read this in line with the post-hermeneutic turn, starting with Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” and her plea for an “erotics of art” (1987, 14), and the resistance to a hermeneutics of suspicion more recently developed in the work of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2003, 2004) on materiality, presence, and new philology, of Eve Sedgwick’s work (2003) on reparative reading, as well as Rita Felski’s (2008) explorations of the social and affective uses of literature, among others. Jane Austen Air Freshener sold by Archie McPhee on http://mcphee.com/shop/ jane-austen-air-freshener.html. It is interesting to note that perfumes such as “Paper Passion,” which is said to capture “the unique olfactory pleasures of the freshly printed book,” or Christopher Brosius’s “In the Library,” which he describes as “a warm blend of English Novel, Russian & Moroccan Leather Bindings, Worn Cloth and a hint of Wood Polish,” have already successfully marketed the olfactory-affective dimensions of reading.

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As the perfumer explains, “The main note in this scent was copied from one of my favorite novels originally published in 1927. I happened to find a signed first edition in pristine condition many years ago in London. I was more than a little excited because there were only ever a hundred of these in the first place. It had a marvelous warm woody slightly sweet smell and I set about immediately to bottle it” (Brosius n.d.). In a similar way, researchers at UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage have developed a “historic book odour wheel” by relating people’s descriptions of the smell of books to the latter’s chemical composition. It is worth noting that book conservators and historians have long recognized the role of smell, not just in the experience of a book but also in assessing the origin and condition of historic books, and in working out how to look after them (Armitstead 2017).

Works cited Abrams, J. J. and Doug Dorst. 2013. S. New York: Mulholland Books. Armitstead, Claire. 2017. “Can You Judge a Book by Its Odour?” The Guardian, April 7. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/07/the-smell-of-old-books-sciencelibraries. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–31. doi:10.1086/345321 Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil. Barthes, Roland. 1986a. “The Death of the Author.” In The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard, 49–55. New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, Roland. 1986b. “From Work to Text.” In The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard, 56–64. New York: Hill and Wang. Bayard, Pierre. 2007. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlmann. London: Granta. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beynon, John. 2002. Masculinities and Culture. Buckingham: Open University Press. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene. 2013. “Re-vision as Remediation: Hypermediacy and Translation in Anne Carson’s Nox.” Image & Narrative 14 (4): 20–33. Brosius, Christopher. “In the Library.” CB I Hate Perfume. http://cbihateperfume.com/ shop/perfumes-a-to-z/306. Brown, Bill. 2003. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Brown, Bill. 2010. “Big Think Interview with Bill Brown.” Big Think. Recorded March 4. http://bigthink.com/videos/big-think-interview-with-bill-brown. Bryant, Levi R. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Calvino, Italo. 1983. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Translated by William Weaver. London: Picador. Carson, Anne. 2010. Nox. New York: New Directions. Cixous, Hélène. 1975. La Jeune Née, with Catherine Clément. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1993. “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection.” Race, Sex, and Class 1 (1): 25–45. Connell, Raewyn. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley : University of California Press. Damásio, António. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam. Descartes, René. 2000 (1637). Discours de la méthode. Paris: Flammarion. Felski, Rita. 2008. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2010. Tree of Codes. New York: Visual Editions. Gesuato, Sara. 1997. “What’s the Reader of a Second-Person Narrative Expected to Do? Discourse Structure and Point of View in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.” Language and Literature 22: 63–91. Grahame-Smith, Seth. 2009. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Philadelphia: Quirk Books. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2003. The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2004. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. Edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, 128–38. London: Hutchinson. Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Peru, IL: Open Court. Hawkins, Ann R., ed. 2006. Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism and Book History. London: Pickering and Chatto. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2005. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2013. “Combining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Aesthetic of Bookishness.” PMLA 128 (1): 226–31. Hayles, N. Katherine and Pressman, Jessica, eds. 2013. Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hodder, Ian. 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Houtman, Dick and Meyer, Birgit, eds. 2012. Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality. New York: Fordham University Press. Ingold, Tim. 2010. “Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials,” ESRC National Centre for Research Methods. Realities Working Paper #15. July (05/10): 1–15. http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/1306/1/0510_creative_entanglements.pdf. Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 2006. “How Things Work: Teaching the Technologies of Literature.” In Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism and Book History. Edited by Ann R. Hawkins, 155–60. London: Pickering and Chatto. Lauretis, Teresa de. 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, John and Hassard, John, eds. 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Lomme, Freek, ed. 2016. Effectuating Tactility and Print in the Contemporary. Eindhoven: Onomatopee. MacFarlane, Robert. 2015. Landmarks. London: Hamish Hamilton. Mak, Bonnie. 2011. How the Page Matters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Malmgren, Carl D. 1986. “Romancing the Reader: Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 6 (2): 106–16. Marks, Laura U. 2008. “Thinking Multisensory Culture.” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 31 (2): 123–37. Miller, Daniel. 2010. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Munteán, László, Plate, Liedeke, and Smelik, Anneke, eds. 2017. Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge. O’Keefe, Deborah. 2016. Good Girl Messages: How Young Women Were Misled by Their Favourite Books. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Olsen, Bjørnar. 2013 (2010). In Defense of Things: Archeology and the Ontology of Objects. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Plate, Liedeke. 2011. Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Plate, Liedeke. 2015. “How to Do Things with Literature in the Digital Age: Anne Carson’s Nox, Multimodality, and the Ethics of Bookishness.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 9 (1): 93–111. Plate, Liedeke. 2016. “Amnesiology: Towards the Study of Cultural Oblivion.” Memory Studies 9 (2): 143–55.

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Plate, Liedeke. 2018. “The Arena of Masculinity: William Stoner and Masculinity Studies.” In Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture: A Comprehensive Guide to Gender Studies, 2nd ed. Edited by Rosemarie Buikema, Liedeke Plate, and Kathrin Thiele, 106–22. London and New York: Routledge. Pressman, Jessica. 2009. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (4): 465–82. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ spo.act2080.0048.402. Price, Leah. 2012. How to do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Proctor, Robert N. and Schiebinger, Londa, eds. 2008. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Radway, Janice. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2010 (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. Rankin, Ian. 1986. “The Role of the Reader in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 6 (2): 124–29. Salvatori, Mariolina. 1986. “Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler: Writer’s Authority, Reader’s Autonomy.” Contemporary Literature 27 (2): 182–212. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shep, Sydney J. 2006. “Bookends: Towards a Poetics of Material Form.” In Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism and Book History. Edited by Ann R. Hawkins, 38–43. London: Pickering and Chatto. Sontag, Susan. 1987. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: André Deutsch. St. Pierre, Elizabeth, Jackson, Alecia, and Mazzei, Liza. 2016. “New Empiricisms and New Materialisms: Conditions for New Inquiry.” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 16 (2): 99–110. doi:10.1177/1532708616638694 Van den Hengel, Louis. 2018. “The Arena of Affect: Marina Abramović and the Politics of Emotion.” In Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture: A Comprehensive Guide to Gender Studies, 2nd ed. Edited by Rosemarie Buikema, Liedeke Plate, and Kathrin Thiele, 123–35. London: Routledge. Wagner, Heather. 2010. “Jonathan Safran Foer Talks Tree of Codes and Conceptual Art.” Vanity Fair, November 10. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/11/jonathansafran-foer-talks-tree-of-codes-and-paper-art. Zima, Peter. 2004. “Zur Institutionalisierung der Leserrolle bei Italo Calvino: Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore.” Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 28 (1–2): 163–83.

8

“Book for Loan”: S. as Paradox of Media Change Emma de Vries and Yra van Dijk

Introduction Anyone interested in the topic of book presence in a digital age will find this interest exquisitely served by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013).1 Too exquisitely, perhaps, not to arouse suspicion. In this chapter, we read this visually spectacular book and its digital paratexts as functioning together as a philosophical paradox about the future of the book. The riddle it presents is not solved, but it will turn out to be of crucial ethical value. S. is a sealed cardboard black box. The slipcase is the only element that names S. as the box’s title, Doug Dorst as its author, and J. J. Abrams as its “conceiver.” Inside is a book that pretends to be an annotated library copy of Ship of Theseus, a fictitious 1949 novel by the equally fictitious V. M. Straka. When the reader opens the copy, she finds it stuffed with various quasi-unique ephemera: a Xerox copy of a journal article, a memo, three newspaper clippings, a telegram, a greeting card, four postcards, five letters, an “In Memoriam” card, two photographs, a map on a napkin, and a decoder wheel (See Figure 8.1). What is more, Ship of Theseus is not only boxed and stuffed but also scribbled upon. On almost every page the margins are covered in penwork, a multicolored patchwork of questions, facts, guesses, hypotheses, academic annotations, and personal associations. This turns out to be an exchange between two (former) students Jennifer Heyward and Eric Husch, who accidentally meet, fight, and flirt, and, inevitably, fall in love, sharing their copy. They hide the thus appropriated book in the most public place of all: the library. This is an irony enforced by the fact that the reader can purchase a mass-produced copy of their secret book with “handwritten” notes for just over twenty dollars.

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Figure 8.1 Contents of book-box S. Reprinted with permission of Mulholland Books.

S. seems to be a perfect example of “the aesthetic of bookishness” or the “re-materialization of the literary.”2 From here it comes as no surprise that the novel’s critics, as well as its authors, have insisted in interviews that S. is “a celebration of the analog, of the physical object” (Rothman 2013), “a celebration of the book as a physical thing” (Tsouderos 2013), and even that it “defends books against every effort to destroy them” (Regier 2015, 163). However, this celebration of the analog is also mocked by S., which in fact is more than just a book, and rather what Henry Jenkins and Jessica Pressman refer to as a “transmedia” constellation (Jenkins 2006; Pressman 2006): a work of fiction dispersed across a hybrid and expansive network of media, with the Ship of Theseus at its core.3 The digital paratext that envelops the “book-box S.” is an intrinsic part of S., in its full bandwidth, scope, and potential.4 An exhaustive inventory of the components of S. would also make mention of two anticipatory trailers, a reader’s kit, accompanying websites,5 the e-book version, the digitally published inserts that form a supplement to the analog ones, the alternative ending(s) that Doug Dorst posted online and announced by Twitter,6 the fictional Twitter and Tumblr accounts run by the protagonists of S,7 and “Radio Straka”: three radio broadcasts and an introductory emission, dedicated to the question Who is

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Straka?8 A game is being played with mysterious, elaborate digital paratexts, both authored and unauthored.9 This is the paradox of the transmedia constellation that is S., since it performs, narrates, and also deconstructs the fetishization of the book. Our understanding of S. as a paradox is strengthened by the observation of a philosophical paradox that stands at the center of project S., pervasive yet faintly noticed: the paradox of the “Ship of Theseus.”10 Surprisingly, hardly any of the published commentaries on S. have wondered what the title of Straka’s novel could mean.11 The “Ship of Theseus” is an ancient philosophical conundrum which asks whether a ship can still be called the same ship if we change all its elements. S. invites us to take this question and apply it to the book as artifact. Can it still be called a book if we change all its elements, as happens in the digital age? The transmedial way in which S. is designed means that it not only sets forward the philosophical paradox but actually functions as a philosophical paradox: it is both a book and not a book at the same time. As a true paradox, it does not solve the issue that it embodies. As an inquiry into the future of the book, S. does not provide an outcome or solution: a fact which it has in common with other transmedial bookprojects discussed in this book and in the broader context of “bookishness.” With its story of two young academics (mis)reading the book Ship of Theseus, however, S. drives its media-theoretical inquiry even further. Since the two lovers meet in the margins of the novel which they then use for their correspondence, the book becomes a vessel for both the creation and the confirmation of their subjectivity and their relationship. S. is not just about the future of the book, but also about the question of how our culture and identity depend on the book. Accordingly, the philosophical paradox of the Ship of Theseus shows us how object identity is caught up with personal, cultural, and relational identity. We thus read S. as an exercise in media theory: looking at books implies looking at how we give meaning to books and to practices that involve books. Drawing on media theorists Claude Shannon and Bernhard Siegert, we will argue that S. focuses these questions on the tradition of hermeneutics. As Liedeke Plate argues in Chapter 7 of this book, the issue of reading as a “social and embodied activity” has too long been neglected in literary criticism. S. seems to be another reminder of the impossibility of cutting loose both reading and meaning-making from their social and material context. This does not mean that S. should be read as a post-hermeneutic project, however. Rather, as we will argue, it takes a meta point of view and demonstrates the entanglements of (digital and analog) writing and reading, materiality, hermeneutics, identity, and human relationships.

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The Ship of Theseus paradox In Ship of Theseus, the fictional novel in the book-box S., the nameless and amnesiac protagonist (“S”) is being held captive on a haunted ship. Whenever it comes to the coast, he is taken off board and forced to join in the fierce freedomstruggle that seems to be taking place in the nameless country on whose shores the ship keeps landing. Unlike most people he encounters on these missions, S. survives the attacks of the totalitarian regime every time, only to be taken into captivity on the ship again. At a certain point during these unwanted adventures, S. is confronted with “a charcoal drawing of his ship. (No, he reminds himself, the ship on which I’ve been held)” in which he hardly recognizes “the ship as he knows it; a horrible thing,” a “mad assemblage” (S., 290). The drawing, by contrast, depicts “an earlier version of it, when it was a harmonious whole, a shipwright’s realization of a xebec that would fly across the main and leave sailors aboard other vessels dumbstruck with envy” (ibid.). Perplexed by this dissimilarity he wonders, “Are they the same ship?” (ibid.). In raising this question, the protagonist S. reinvents the ancient paradox after which Straka’s novel is named: The Ship of Theseus paradox. This old philosophical puzzle is based on an early case of cultural heritage. According to Plutarch, when Theseus returned from Crete having slain the Minotaur, the Athenians expressed their appreciation for Theseus by preserving the ship with which he had returned: The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place. (Plutarch 1868, 21)

The ship that makes its appearance in Straka’s Ship of Theseus has much in common with the ship that the Athenians maintained: The ship itself is an archaic looking vessel. . . . And it is improbable-looking as well, in a state midway between decrepitude and tidy renovation, albeit renovation performed by a shipwright working against reason. The ship is freshly replanked in some places, while in others the wood has rotted [sic] away. . . . Two of the three lateen sails look fresh from the nearest sail loft, while the third is torn and frayed. (S., 28, emphasis added)

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As Plutarch observes, the ship conserved by the Athenians became “a standing example among the philosophers” (1868, 21). Was the Ship of Theseus with its new parts still the same ship, or was it no longer the same? Since Plutarch, generations of philosophers have returned to the Ship of Theseus as an image of diachronic identity. How are we to understand identity over time? Are sameness and changeability commensurable attributes? Can something change without ceasing to be what it was? How do present and past identity relate? What discontinuities does the persistence of identity allow for and what continuity does it demand? Plutarch’s account is concise: it sketches the quandary in a single sentence, and its solution as a choice between two viewpoints. The actual philosophical debate, however, has given rise to a multitude of theories, schools, stances, and applications. Abrams and Dorst’s S., and especially its “inner novel” by Straka, reflect part of this “journey” of Theseus’s ship since Plutarch’s times. The detail and explicitness with which it does so attest to the pivotal role the paradox has in the book, and in the larger transmedia constellation that we consider S.12 In ways both textual and material, S. invites us to take the paradox of the ship as an allegory of the book. In the novel Ship of Theseus, the specificities of the ship’s itinerary remain mysterious, yet its destination and destiny are clearly bound up with those of writing. On the orlop deck (the deck deepest down in this sort of ship), the crew takes turns in frantic writing practices. And when the ship docks, it is to offload the crates stuffed with their production: text, ink-stained piles of paper. Like the book, this ship is a carrier of writing. In another scene, ships and books are visually juxtaposed in a lengthy, detailed description: “A bookcase covers the entirety of the far wall, holding similarlysized books . . . . Covering the other three walls are paintings and drawings of ships” (S., 285). Yet the parallelism between ships and books is not only drawn textually, but also materially. Analogous to the ship that “again and again, . . . sheds a feature and dons a new one, reinterpreted and remade” (S., 291), project S. presents a text that is in a permanent state of alteration. These alterations can imply an extension, when elements are added through its alternative endings, additions in the margins, foreword, footnotes, be it on paper, be it in the digital ambits of this transmedia project. Yet at the same time, the alterations can imply a loss. Like S.’s ship, which continuously loses parts, the inserts in bookbox S. expose the object to amputation and change: these can easily get lost, or displaced.

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A compelling image to understand this dynamics of “shedding” and “donning” is the odd contradiction between the stamped texts on the first and the last page of the library copy of Ship of Theseus. “KEEP THIS BOOK CLEAN,” the last page of the book instructs. “Borrowers finding this book pencil-marked, written upon, mutilated or unwarrantedly defaced, are expected to report the librarian.” Accordingly, this last page forbids the appropriation to which the first page seems to invite: “BOOK FOR LOAN.” Strangely enough, project S. can be taken to appease the tension between these contradictory instructions, by repeatedly assimilating external elements. Through every shift of the project’s boundaries, paratext becomes text proper. Accordingly, the translator’s preface and annotations that once were an external addition to Straka’s manuscript of Ship of Theseus become an intrinsic part of the 1949 book edition of the novel. Subsequently, the marginalia and ephemera that Eric and Jennifer include in the margin of that copy become an intrinsic part of the book-box S. We propose to regard the entire “project S.” as a result of yet another episode of this incorporation of external, digital, additions (See Figure 8.2). The book Ship of Theseus is, just as Jessica Pressman argued about House of Leaves, “a central node in a network of multimedia, multi-authored forms” (2006, 107). By resurrecting the paradox of the Ship of Theseus within this constellation, S. raises questions about the identity of such networks, and the implication of its expansive, integrative dynamics. By drawing a parallel between the dynamics of change and continuity in the riddle of Theseus’s ship and media-technological transformation, S. hints at the applicability of this philosophical paradox to debates about today’s media culture. The paradox makes these debates—among, primarily, literary scholars and media theorists, archaeologists, and historians—recognizable as structured by the same question. The story of S. and its alternative endings, to which we will return later, seem to be an attempt to cover all possible positions on the axis between faith and skepticism about “the future of the book” (Wurth 2012). In the allegorical reading of project S., in which the paradox of the Ship of Theseus applies to the state of the book, compelling questions emerge: What does it take to keep the book afloat, as the Athenians demanded of Theseus’s ship? And inversely, what would it take to sink the book-ship? How do losses and additions, alterations and expansions change the book, or even determine whether it is still worthy of that name? S. allegorically describes all the positions scholars have taken vis-à-vis the diachronic medium change. By structurally reflecting the possible stances toward the future of the book in terms of

“Book for Loan”

PARA- / METATEXTS TO S. [THE PROJECT]

S. [THE PROJECT]

PARA- AND METATEXTS TO S. [THE BOOK-BOX]

S. [THE BOOK-BOX]

SHIP OF THESEUS [THE BOOK]

SHIP OF THESEUS [THE MANUSCRIPT]

PARA-AND METATEXTS TO SHIP OF THESEUS [THE MANUSCRIPT]

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Hiatus this chapter hopes to occupy

Trailers of S. Reader’s Kit to SI Digital Marginalia to S: Blogposts and website comments Additional material to Ship of Theseus Additional paratext to Ship of Theseus: inserts

Marginalia Inserts Radio Straka Found review

Foreword Footnotes

Figure 8.2 Schematic rendering of our understanding of S. as an expanding, aggregative transmedia constellation, that encompasses not only the fictional novel, inserts and marginalia that the book-box S. envelopes, but also the meta- and paratexts that accompany this book-box. The accumulative process of inclusion that this figure tries to schematize, also shows how the notion of “metatext or paratext” is rendered senseless every time these elements become an integrative part of the next dimension of the project, and appendices and addenda become proper parts.

desperate hope or detached skepticism, S. emphasizes that the question has larger stakes than merely whether something is worthy of a particular name. What hinges on the continuity of the ship? And, by extension, what hinges on the continuity of the book? The ambivalence of S.’s bookishness, however, is found in the fact that it does not take a position. Rather it asks the metaquestion: Why do these questions matter at all? What S. demonstrates is that the question of the future of the book is essentially a question of the diachronic identity of objects, an inquiry into the persistence of a medium over time. And like the philosophers who picked up the debate after Plutarch, S. emphasizes that such object identity is necessarily a question of personal and cultural identity.13

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Bookish hermeneutics S. demonstrates that the question of objects is not just about objects, but fundamentally about the people who interact with them over time, and the culture that is the sum of these interactions. As in the new materialist stance that Liedeke Plate sketches in her contribution, the book-object in S. is considered by us to be a node in an entanglement of readers’ bodies, histories, and identities. This becomes especially clear in the epistolary and appropriating reading practice of Jennifer and Eric, who not only write in the library copy that they share, but who also insist on seeing their own love-story mirrored in the relation between the author and his translator. This epistolary practice of interpretation reflects cultural history as practised by Bernhard Siegert (1999). The hermeneutic principles and practices that we have come to associate with the literary book, he argues, originally spring from yet another medium: that of the letter. This medium also has a pervasive presence in project S.14 Almost half of the inserts in book-box S. are letters of some kind: among the twenty-one ephemera, we find a greeting card, four postcards, and five letters. Moreover, throughout the story of S., other elements of the project are identified as epistolary texts. And what at first seemed to be marginal notes to a novel, developed into a correspondence between Eric and Jen. Likewise, it is suggested that the footnotes to Ship of Theseus are not so much an annotation system as a communication system: the novel and notes compose a secret exchange between Straka and his translator.15 It is by having a closer look at these letter-like dynamics that we can explain the importance of hermeneutics in S. The letter, Siegert argues, possesses specific properties that formed the selfunderstanding of the modern subject. This property is what, following Derrida, he calls the “relay”—“a halt, a relay, or a suspensive delay” (Siegert 1999, 10; Derrida 1987a, 65). It is an interval, a delay, and a withholding. In the relay, myriad things can occur. Interferences might delay or distort the message, or overpower the signal to such extent that the message is altered or intercepted altogether. Yet in this danger zone, meaning becomes not only unstable, but also possible. The “relay” is the place (and time) where meaning can get lost, and it is the place where meaning is to be found.16 Found by whom? By the hermeneutic reader, Siegert would answer (cf. Siegert 1999, 242). This hermeneutic reader, he explains, is the one with whom the modern subject has come to identify him or herself. Beyond a mere literary reading strategy, hermeneutics is a mode of beingin-the-world: the relay is not only the place where meaning gets lost and found,

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but also where the subject realizes itself in the act of searching for meaning: the “circuit of interpretations .  .  .  was the ‘site’ where subjects are made to exist” (Siegert 1999, 75–76). Similarly, in S., what the two couples (Eric and Jen, and the writer and translator) encounter through their marginalia and footnotes, what they find in the epistolary dynamic of their interpretive act is not meaning but themselves and each other. Here one sees how this notion of hermeneutics propagates an understanding of personal and cultural identity that is both profoundly relational and profoundly material. The modern concept of literature, Siegert claims, came to coincide fully with the concept of the letter: as a communication between the individual interiority of an authentic author with his interpreting reader.17 And where literature developed into the hermeneutic form par excellence, the book became its monumental carrier. Pondering the consequences of media-technological change for this modern self-understanding, Siegert draws on the information theory of Claude Shannon (Siegert 1999, 255). With Shannon, one can redefine the relay in terms of entropy. Entropy denotes the measure of uncertainty in a transferred message, which depends on delays and disturbances in the communication channels: noise. A high level of entropy implies that signals come through, but in too confused a manner to impose a single interpretation. It is a state in which the facts of the matter are obscure, unclear, uncertain, ambiguous. In digital media, Shannon observes, entropy is generally far lower than in analog media. Returning to Siegert, we can explain why this distinction between analog and digital media is so often assessed in a way that might sound counterintuitive: the disqualification of the medium that entails greater clarity and less uncertainty. Yet now that we know how modern self-understanding depends on this uncertainty, we can understand the attachment to entropy. Or to rephrase it again in terms of the philosophical paradox: we get a sense of the personal and cultural implications of particular object properties. When the relay is minimized, ambivalences are enervated to errors, meaning is condensed to information, and interpretation replaced by cryptanalytics, understanding by calculation (Siegert 1999, 262). Accordingly, Siegert claims, digital technology renders the human redundant (263). The book-box S. seems designed to be the Hermeneut’s ultimate playground and pleasure garden, densely packed with poetic symbolism. The full repertoire of grand literary topoi is present, as are the textual genres of which the book used to be the main carrier: S. employs by turns the traits of the scholarly publication, the biography, the Cold War novel, the detective novel, the romantic novel, the saga, the odyssey, the epistolary novel, and the postal plot. There are allusions to

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ancient mythology, biblical references, intertextual dialogism with the modern classics, Gordian knots of intersecting plotlines, mirror games of parallelisms and multiplications, and a labyrinth of contradictions. Whereas digital media’s “optimal coding” aims to minimize entropy, S. seems to desire its maximization. This is even expressed by its title: in information theory, as in thermodynamics, “S” stands for entropy. While the letter “S” indicates entropy, the interferences responsible for the delays and distortions that augment entropy, are referred to as “noise.” S. is not only noisy in its abundance of ambiguity; noise also has an explicit presence in Ship of Theseus. It is the “static of radio frequencies” that is used to hide “secret messages” (S., 325) and the sound or static that protagonist S. observes buzzing around the ship, and intensifying as the story proceeds. By the end of the book it is increasingly unbearable: “That terrible resonance that saturates the air” (S., 325). The sound here described resembles the sound that repeatedly invades the first broadcast of “Radio Straka”: an uncanny interweaving of maritime sounds—waves, seagulls, and vibrating rope—with a high frequency buzz.18 “Radio Straka” is a podcast-series and a Twitter stream, presented as a recurring radio show, which was launched online in the months after the publication of S. The broadcasts treat the question “Who is Straka?” through free association and wild speculation. (Straka was born in the same year football was invented. Could there be a relation between Straka and football?). The suggestions on the website “whoisstraka.wordpress.com” are often no less improbable and farfetched. By this observation, we do not disclaim the interest of Radio Straka, or the analytical powers of (assumed) readers. Both provide information that often makes sense and sometimes is useful or even illuminating. Their greatest interest, however, lies in the fact that a major part of these posts and comments is devoid of any explanatory value. These resemble the translator’s notes in Ship of Theseus: they aim to hide, rather than reveal. They appear ubiquitously, but hardly ever where you would expect or want an explanatory note. Obvious references are left unmarked, while contestable and far-fetched associations are highlighted. To stick to the Theseus-theme: they send you deeper into the labyrinth rather than handing you Ariadne’s thread. In maximizing entropy, S. uncovers the hermeneutic underpinnings of book cult(ure) and drives these to a point of absurdity. In this way, project S. seems to question hermeneutics at large: as the modern self-understanding that culminates in book culture. In maximizing perplexity, S. celebrates analog entropy and the hermeneutics this entropy allows for. At the same time project S.

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demonstrates how digital media, pace Shannon, can generate entropy just as well as their analog counterpart. The conception of “informational culture” as “posthermeneutical” (Hansen 2004, 599) hence attests rather to the new medium’s prevailing application than its irreducible property.19 Moreover, in creating just as many “cloud spheres” as “signal points,” to use Shannon’s terminology, S. turns out not to be the grand hermeneutic indulgence that we first took it for: hermeneutic readership is just as much thwarted and teased as it is facilitated. The interpreting reader of S. is given a pleasure garden and simultaneously sent into a thicket of confusion and entropy. Likewise, the anti-hermeneutic reader is shown what he or she is missing: how an interpretive investigatory eye can perceive a rich philosophical history in a book that would otherwise go unnoticed. But the anti-hermeneutic reader would miss something even more crucial: communication with other people. S. provides its own hermeneutic readers: the two protagonists who page after page, in seven different colors of ink, live up to Siegert’s remarks that “hermeneutic reading made a virtue even out of scribbling in valuable books” (1999, 71). As it unfolds, project S. comes to stress the relational effect of these interpretive practices. The exchanges between Jen and Eric are not about finding the cipher, the key to this text, but rather about entering the dialogue with each other and forming their identity in the process. The immaterial practice of hermeneutics is thus demonstrated to be fundamentally ethical and to be intrinsically linked to the material practices connected to the book-object: reading, lending, exchanging, and transforming. Jennifer and Eric make Ship of Theseus grow with their texts and supplements. Their material and hermeneutic work does have an effect in reality: their identity and their growing relationship. Again, we refer to Liedeke Plate’s contribution and her sketch of the new materialist stance: “The ‘new materialist’ interest in things leads to a re-evaluation of the relationship between people and things, who are now seen as both important to social life and practice and thus as co-dependent.” What both reading and hermeneutics in S. have produced is indeed relationality.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the extent to which project S. is of interest and importance for the inquiry into media-technological change in general, and into

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the book in particular. We have addressed the question of what S. is and also what it does. S. is better described as a transmedia constellation than as a book. Through its voracious integration of media systems, S. plays with many forms: it is part book, part correspondence, part commercial stunt, short film, social network, sound art, etc. S. is a formal experiment that raises questions about the identity of this object, and the implication of its expansive dynamics. By relating a paradox of rupture and continuity to cultural artifacts, and their renovation, preservation, or innovation, S. also makes contemporary debates on media-technological change recognizable as recurrences of an age-old puzzle. The way in which this paradox is reenacted in S. in the form of an ever-changing ship, is to be read as an allegory of media change, and of the book in particular. S. embodies a paradox—the multimedia constellation celebrating the book, the hermeneutic endeavor that unearths only superfluous information—which is designed to foreground the issue of the relation between media, hermeneutics and modern subjects. It is here that S. demonstrates the relevance of the Ship of Theseus paradox for the question on the persistence of the book in a digital age. By simultaneously underlining and undermining the cultural association between the book and the possibility of hermeneutics, S. incorporates opposing voices, some faithful and others skeptical of the preservation of the book.20 Even more, the project provides insight in one of the principles underlying these positions. Philosophical paradoxes force us to inquire where we stand and why, on the basis of what principles. We read S. as an argument ad absurdum—the quintessential method employed by philosophical paradoxes in order to think through a matter to its ultimate implications. It drives to its extremes the stakes of the culture, cult, and cultivation of the book. From here, it is normal to wonder where S. stands. Does it end up taking a position in this quandary? Time and again, the pervasive presence of the paradox throughout the project, as well as its structure of opera aperta seems to proscribe the pinpointing of any stance. Is it hence, as the paradoxes in medieval times, a true insolubilium? The alternative endings to the inner novel that have been published on the internet would seem to confirm this thesis of unresolvability.21 While the final chapter of the book reads, “destroyed, and it is worth preserving. And if it can’t be preserved, then it should be released and cycled” (S., 451), “Version 273” reads “destroyed. But it must circulate. It must not be contained” (Shipman 2014b; cf. Dorst 2014). This, in turn, is contradicted by “Version 288,” which reads, “destroyed. And it is worth preserving.” All conflicting ends seem to mount up to “Version 291,” a

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grand affirmation of the puzzlement resulting from the opera aperta structure of this project. Here the end reads, “Where will their steps lead?” But the material book Ship of Theseus, the soiled library copy, ends differently. After the END, there is a blank page, with just a handwritten message from Jennifer: “Hey, put the book down. Come in here + stay.” The ethical significance of reading is not in the solving of riddles, but in the entanglement of subjects, objects, and meaning over time.

Notes 1 Henceforth referred to parenthetically in the text as “S.” 2 Jessica Pressman describes the aesthetic of bookishness as “an emergent literary strategy,” of twenty-first century novels that “exploit the power of the print page in ways that draw attention to the book as a multimedia format, one informed by and connected to digital technologies,” which means that they “present a serious reflection on the book” (2009, 465–66). By the same token, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth’s project “Book Presence in the Digital Age” focuses on how book-objects “re-materialize the literary as a print-based medium in the era of the digital” (2011, 120). 3 Not all scholars who endorse Abrams and Dorst’s claim that S. is a celebration of the analog physicality of the book are as neglectful of the work’s digital parergon, however. Nicole Howard provides a neat (though necessarily incomplete) overview of digital references that place S. in a “paratextual relationship with the internet” (2014, 92), yet she leaves the implications of this relationship unexamined. Meanwhile, Brendon Wocke acknowledges the fact that despite its old appearance, a book like S. could never have been technically mass-produced without today’s cutting-edge printing technologies (Wocke 2014, 9), let alone for such a low retail price, but he accords the digital no other role than that of a technological condition of possibility. In contrast to these mentions of “digital paratexts” that stand in a mere relation of “tension and ambiguity” (Tanderup 2016, 53) with what S. first and foremost is considered to be—a book, in celebration of the book—we propose an inverted reasoning. For Genette, the text is central and the paratext a supplement, “an assistant, an accessory of the text” (1997, 410). But since he also affirms that there exists no text without paratext, he remains ambivalent about this supplementary nature of the paratext. We will understand it rather as a parergon in the Derridean (1987b) sense: connected to a lack in the work itself (ergon). For S., this means that the paratext is an integral part of the paradox that it presents. 4 The relationship between these digital components and the book-box S. is bidirectional: while these assumed “fansites” refer to book-box S., S. reciprocates

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Book Presence in a Digital Age the gesture. The comments in the margins of the novel inside S., for instance, refer explicitly to the very sort of website that serves to comment on S. See, for instance, the margin note on page 23: “So the Danish guy’s website has about fifty theories about what the symbol [S] means.” See, for instance, http://sfiles22.blogspot.com/ and http://www.eotvoswheel.com/ See https://whoisstraka.wordpress.com/chapter-10-alternative-endings/ See @VMStraka, @EricHusch, @JenHeyward, @FXCaldeira, http://jenheyward. tumblr.com/ and http://isla-dirks.tumblr.com/ See http://radiostraka.com/. This website has ceased to exist, but the broadcasts are still available via https://www.mixcloud.com/NTSRadio/radiostraka-show1/ In addition to the authored paratexts, there is a series of websites and readers’ blogs. See, for instance, https://whoisstraka.wordpress.com and http://swiki.zachwhalen. net/. Through its general concern with pseudonyms, anonymity, and the notion of collaborative authorship, S. itself seems to claim a relative irrelevance of the question whether these websites are part of the project or not, while at the same time investing in the mystery. The presenter of Radio Straka, for instance, opens his show declaring irrelevant both his own name, and of the show’s leading question “Who is Straka?”: an ambivalence that corresponds to the paradox that S. performs. The history of philosophy knows many variations of the Ship of Theseus paradox, of which, as Roderick Chisholm (1976) observes, Heraclitus’s famous dictum that “you could not step twice in the same river; for other and yet other waters are even flowing on” is one (89). In project S., the Heraclitean river is almost as persistently present as Theseus’s ship, ranging from the text on the slipcase seal of the book-box to its manifold variations throughout the novel: “What begins at the water shall end there / And what ends there shall once more begin.” So far, only one post on whoisstraka.wordpress.com (Shipman 2014a), and a master’s thesis (Krasenberg 2014) take notice of the Ship of Theseus paradox. Whereas the former does not move beyond mere mention, the latter reads the paradox only as a puzzle on personal identity, and not as the reflection on object identity that we primarily take it to be. This detail goes further than this text can account for. For instance, S. seems to refer to the complexity that Thomas Hobbes, in 1656, added to Plutarch’s paradox, when it describes the ship not only as “renovated” but also as “reassembled” (1839: 290). Hobbes introduced an additional element into the thought experiment, by proposing to imagine that “some man [who] had kept the old planks as they were taken out, and by afterwards putting them together in the same order, had again made a ship of them” (1839, 136). Accordingly, in addition to the original ship, and the renovated one “made by continual reparation in taking out the old planks and putting in the new” (ibid.), the ancient riddle now involves a third element: a reassembled ship. Both ships can be convincingly argued to be Theseus’s ship. This

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observation, however, has the surprising effect of a magical multiplication: if we accept both views, we end up with two Ships of Theseus. Whereas Hobbes discounts the possibility of doubling, project S. is an eager exploration of that possibility: one chapter is called “The Drifting Twins,” while the final is called “Ships [sic] of Theseus,” and throughout the book Doppelgängers, “composite theories,” and plural personalities abound. In this play with doublings and parallels, references to yet another engagement with the Ship of Theseus paradox can be found: the philosophical position of the “four-dimensionalists” that project S. repeatedly mentions explicitly (e.g., on p. viii). The four-dimensionalists’ take on the Ship of Theseus paradox emanates from their specific understanding of time. In contrast to the “presentists,” who believe that only the present has reality, while the past is an artifact of memory and the future a mental construct, four-dimensionalists sustain an eternalist notion of time, whereby past, present, and future are regions of time that are equally real and that exist simultaneously. Accordingly, objects are considered to extend in time in a manner analogous to their extension in space. Thus, a fourth dimension is added to an object’s length, width and height. The sort of world that this perspective allows for is that of S.’s inner novel: a world in which time unfolds at different paces in different places: compared to the mainland, on board of the ship time is “accelerated” (S., 224–26). 13 In 1689, John Locke will return to the issues that are at stake in the Ship of Theseus paradox, by way of his lengthy reflection on “Identity and Diversity” in Book II, Chapter xxvii of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Even though Locke makes no explicit reference to Plutarch, his questions are the same: wherein identity consists, when and “whether anything be the same or no” (1856, 206). After discussing the continuity of substances, he proceeds, from §6 onward, to discuss the “identity of man,” inquiring what makes the same human over time, “to find wherein personal identity consists” (210). If we are, as Plutarch calls it, “[some] thing that grows,” that changes over time, how does that change impact who we are? If something like personal identity exists, what is its constituent? While protagonist S.’s repeated question, “Who am I?,” echoes Locke’s inquiry, his amnesia points toward the outcome of the latter’s quest: Locke determined consciousness to be the criterion of personal identity across time. Whereas forgetfulness implies interrupted consciousness, memory attests to its continuity (215). The memory loss of Straka’s protagonist seems to bring along identity loss. Not only does S. suffer from an uncertainty about his own identity, also to others he appears unidentifiable: repeatedly, he is described as the sort of man who passes without being noticed or remembered. S. is “the transparent man” (cf. Shipman 2014b), “a man who does not attract attention” (S., 4), “grown complacent with being overlooked” (S., 19). In compliance with Locke’s dictum, S. here shows that there can be no recognition without recollection.

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14 For a more expansive and in-depth analysis of this aspect, see de Vries (2018). 15 “I know the footnotes are really strange but what if they weren’t supposed to be informative? What if they were signals or messages to someone—like Straka himself?” (Margin note Jen, page 0). “What if they were sending messages to each other in the book? Both directions. . . . why not by phone / letter / telegram . . .?” (Margin notes Eric 232). 16 The belief in a “postal origin of meaning” (Siegert 1999, 233), following which the relay is the condition of possibility of signification, is what Siegert indicates as the “principe postale” (9), as “postal a priori” (10), and finally as the modern subject’s “narcissistic belief that everything that goes on is being delivered to them” (263). 17 This is why, as the subtitle of Siegert’s book puts it, “literature” as such can be seen as “an epoch of the postal system.” 18 This “noise” is most prominent around 22:30 and during the last minutes of the broadcast. http://podgallery.org/radio-straka/ 19 Similar points have been made by Johanna Drucker (2013) and Mark Marino (2013). While Marino demonstrates how code can be just as much the object of hermeneutics, Drucker reminds us of the fact that computers should not be fully equated with binary systems, since the most dominant programming language (html) still depends on the alphabetic system of writing. 20 In this sense it is comparable to Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Mark Hansen observes that the book does not claim a “pregiven privilege” over all the other media that figure in it: “House of Leaves thereby opens itself to the infinite matrix of information outside of it in a way that is almost unprecedented even among contemporary novels” (Hansen 2004, 628). Like our stance on S., Hansen claims that House of Leaves foregrounds hermeneutics. The difference is that Hansen finds House of Leaves to foreground a “bodily hermeneutics,” whereas we think that S. focuses rather on the relational aspects of hermeneutics. 21 For a list of these alternative endings, see https://whoisstraka.wordpress.com/ chapter-10-alternative-endings/

Works cited Abrams, J. J. and Dorst, Doug, 2013. S. New York: Mulholland Books. Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene, 2011. “Posthumanities and Post-Textualities: Reading The Raw Shark Texts and Woman’s World.” Comparative Literature 63 (2): 119–41. doi:10.1215/00104124-1265447 Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene, ed. 2012. Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature through Cinema and Cyberspace. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Chisholm, Roderick M., 1976. Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study. London: Allen and Unwin. Derrida, Jacques, 1987a. The Post Card. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated, with an Introduction and Additional Notes, by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques, 1987b. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dorst, Doug (@dougdorst), 2014. “ICYMI: Straka’s Original Ending for Ship of Theseus May Have Been Found.” Twitter, July 8, 10:34 PM. https://twitter.com/dougdorst/ statuses/486745159036448768 Drucker, Johanna, 2013. “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7 (1). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/ dhq/vol/7/1/000143/000143.html Genette, Gerard, 1997. Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hansen, Mark B. N., 2004. “The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. ” Contemporary Literature 45 (4): 597–636. doi:10.1353/cli.2005.0004 Hobbes, Thomas, 1839 [1655]. Elements of Philosophy. The First Section, Concerning Body. Vol. 1 of The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Edited by Sir William Molesworth. London: John Bohn. https://archive.org/details/ englishworkstho21hobbgoog Howard, Nicole M., 2014. “Irrational Paratext: Manipulated Paratext in the Gothic Postmodern Novels House of Leaves, The Adventuress and The Three Incestuous Sisters.” MA thesis, University of Canterbury. https://core.ac.uk/download/ files/901/35471918.pdf Jenkins, Henry, 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Krasenberg, Julia, 2014. “Part o’ th’ Tradition. A Look at the Way the Search for the Self Is Shown in S. and How This Novel Inspires the Search for the Self in Its Readers.” MA thesis, Utrecht University. https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/301154 Locke, John, 1856. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise on the Conduct of the Understanding. Philadelphia: Hayes & Zell. https://books.google.com/ books?id=ZF0XAQAAMAAJ Marino, Mark, 2013. “Reading exquisite_code: Critical Code Studies of Literature.” In Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era. Edited by N. Katherine Hayes and Jessica Pressman, 283–309. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Plutarch, 1868. “Theseus.” In Plutarch’s Lives. The Translation Called Dryden’s. Corrected from the Greek and Revised by A. H. Clough, vol. 1, 1–38. Boston: Little, Brown. Google Books. https://books.google.com/books?id=DxjgAAAAMAAJ Pressman, Jessica, 2006. “House of Leaves. Reading the Networked Novel.” Studies in American Fiction 34 (1): 107–28. doi:10.1353/saf.2006.0015

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Pressman, Jessica, 2009. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (4): 465–82. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ spo.act2080.0048.402 Regier, Willis G., 2015. “Review of S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst.” Prairie Schooner 89 (1): 161–63. doi:10.1353/psg.2015.0087 Rothman, Joshua, 2013. “The Story of ‘S’: Talking with J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst.” The New Yorker, November 23. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/thestory-of-s-talking-with-j-j-abrams-and-doug-dorst Shipman, Brian, 2014a. “John Locke in ‘S’.” Thoughts on “S,” June 18. https://whoisstraka. wordpress.com/2014/06/18/1003/ Shipman, Brian, 2014b. “Straka’s Original Ending for Ship of Theseus.” Thoughts on “S,” July 19. https://whoisstraka.wordpress.com/2014/07/19/strakas-original-ending-forship-of-theseus/ Siegert, Bernhard, 1999. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System. Translated by Kevin Repp. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tanderup, Sara, 2016. “Nostalgic Experiments: Memory in Anne Carson’s Nox and J. J. Abrams’ S. ” Image & Narrative 17 (3): 46–56. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/ index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/1282 Tsouderos, Trine, 2013. “Review: ‘S.’ by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst.” Chicago Tribune, 28 November. http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/chi-jj-abrams-sreview-20131128-story.html de Vries, Emma, 2018. “The Postal Imagination: Returning Mail in Contemporary Culture.” PhD diss., Leiden University. Wocke, Brendon John, 2014. “The Analogue Technology of S: Exploring Narrative Form and the Encoded Mystery of the Margin.” Between 4 (8): 1–21. http://ojs.unica. it/index.php/between/article/view/1313

9

Book Presence and Feline Absence: A Conversation with Mark Z. Danielewski Kári Driscoll and Inge van de Ven

Since the publication of his monumental début novel, House of Leaves in 2000, Mark Z. Danielewski has emerged as one of the great champions of the book as artifact in the twenty-first century. His latest project, The Familiar, is set to comprise twenty-seven volumes total, and, judging by the five volumes that have been published so far, will likely run to over 20,000 pages. On a cold night in December 2016, we sat down for a Skype conversation with Danielewski. We spoke with him about the state of the art of print and all things bookish in a digital age. We invited him to reflect on the apocalyptic predictions of the demise of the book, on the unique pleasures of reading print literature, the advantages and disadvantages of e-books for life, the signiconic, and visual culture. And the ways in which the digital renews the reading experience of print books, in terms of affect and tactility. We were especially interested in hearing his opinions on the monumentality of the book as a durable and resilient medium, in terms of the newly apparent materialities of literature, particularly in the context of his Familiar project, which raises questions concerning the extravagant demands he places on his readers in terms of effort, time, and shelf space. Along the way, we talked about binge reading, collective intelligence, technical difficulties, and reading code. And of course: what’s up with all the cats? KD: I think it’s fair to say that ever since House of Leaves you’ve been one of the great proponents of print as a medium. At the same time, you’ve also been at the forefront of using the internet as a digital paratext to the physical novel, in the shape of the House of Leaves forum. So we wanted to have a conversation with you about where you think the book is at, right now, and where you see yourself in relation to the place of the book in the digital age.

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MZD: I don’t disagree with what you’ve said, though I wouldn’t characterize myself as a proponent of print. But it is curious that, even as I continue to publish new works, I seem to create books that are inherently averse to a digital experience and by contrast loved more as a print experience. My publisher informs me that, where most authors sell about thirty percent of their books digitally now, my books sell around three percent digitally. You can buy The Familiar now as a digital, pdf experience. But readers seem to enjoy the tactile experience. Is this because a lot of the readers of The Familiar are readers of House of Leaves and Only Revolutions, and in a certain way predisposed? That’s possible, but that’s not entirely true. Maybe they are older, so they’re used to print, so they gravitate toward that experience? That’s not necessarily true either, because there are a lot of younger readers. So I’m not sure. But it’s certainly true that I pay a great deal of attention to how the book is created, going so far as to build phonebooks in order to experience what 880 pages feel like, and how thick or thin the paper should be so it’s manageable. Even the weight is important. As I’m writing about this tiny insubstantial cat, who is the absent feline at the beginning of this tale, I like the counterweight, the heaviness, the tactile communication of weight and size. That’s a brief sketch of why I think that’s the case. What do you both think? IV: In many ways, this is an old question that keeps resurfacing. In 1975, Ulises Carrión described the book as not merely a container of words but as a sequence of spaces and, perhaps more importantly, a sequence of moments, an autonomous “space-time sequence” (1980, 8). What Carrión called “The New Art of Making Books” is really the making of an autonomous and self-sufficient form, with a text that emphasizes that form is an organic part of it. This seems like a description of some of your works, like House of Leaves, Only Revolutions, and now The Familiar. Maybe readers intuit this and are drawn to the monumental form of these works as autonomous space-time sequences that allow them momentarily to flee the hectic, information-intensive everyday? MZD: It does seem that way. I wonder how much of the book is rooted in my reputation, my overall work. Literally and physically, House of Leaves puts the scattering and assemblage of leaves in the forefront. It’s all about the construction of the book and the destruction of the book. But why though should that hold true for The Familiar? I’m not sure. Because those numbers aren’t changing, even as now new readers enter. Let’s say

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it was a group that had heard about it, and didn’t want to read it digitally. Why isn’t that percentage climbing? Do you think it is the readers? IV: In the case of The Familiar, I think notions of size, materiality, and monumentality are all interrelated. We often assume a correlation between quantity and quality. In everyday language we do this habitually, using terms like “great,” “grand,” “magnificent.” So we see and feel the material characteristics of weight, length, bulk, size, page numbers, and expect them to be indicators of the book’s contents, its conceptual magnitude. Marketers of books know this and appropriate these monumental aspects as a strategy to create value. And it works. I’m sure I’m not the only reader who is very much looking forward to having The Familiar’s twenty-seven volumes properly displayed in my bookcase . . . KD: Steel-reinforced shelves . . . IV: Exactly. E-books obviously do not have this added benefit of demonstrating symbolic capital, this “weighty” quality that is both literal and figural. And of course there is the matter of canonization, which includes the way that people like us, academics and teachers of literature, use your novels in class. We are complicit. Whether you like it or not, you have been appropriated as one of a handful of contemporary authors who are currently reinventing the book-bound novel. MZD: Here’s a broader question: What does tracing out the differences between digital and print ultimately give us? What does that actually tell us about literature? IV: I think we live under the assumption that the work changes with its material instantiations. The book, the e-book, the scroll, or the app: these are more than simply carriers of information, they determine how we write, how we create. In this respect, Only Revolutions becomes a separate work, rather than just a different version of the same work, when it is adapted to the e-book format. Its materiality and visual design are such an integral and indispensable part of its overall meaning and quality, they are fully integrated into the narrative. The book is a container of the storyworld, yet at the same time I feel that it is contained by this world, if that makes sense. Shape and texture of book, page, and print all play into this dynamic. So it’s not just a different version of the same work. KD: In many cases, particularly with the epub format or on plain-text repositories like Project Gutenberg, there is a prevailing assumption that the text is really “just the words,” that it’s only about the content and not

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the form. One of the reasons that we wanted to have this conversation with you about book presence in a digital age is that from House of Leaves onward, and in your whole oeuvre, you have been invested in the form, rather than just the content. Perhaps it’s not so much about print as such, but rather the materiality of the text, of literature. MZD: As much as my work is made to show a kind of literary advocacy for a kind of form, the margins that differentiate these forms have become narrower. In the past we were just glad to see the same work, whether it was written on papyrus or clay or carved in stone.1 And the fact that that letter or the series of letters could communicate something that groups in different places and different times could agree upon was enough. When I was in school, I studied under John Hollander, who’s a formidable poet, and a close friend and ally (most of the time) of Harold Bloom’s. The sentiment there was that paying any attention to the visual is a kind of idolatry of text. It’s to hold up these golden calves of importance and to miss the fact that it’s what’s beyond the serif, and the design, and the colors that matters. So that how language lived on a page was irrelevant and it should be immaterial. I don’t think I have an answer to whether or not John Hollander was right. Certainly he was experimenting as well with concrete poetry. But I think his reservations resonated in me in a positive way, in that I’m exploring if that in fact is true. Again, we live in a day and age where the technology of creation and reproduction is so exact that it can take advantage of these small margins. And thanks to readers of my work and writers and thinkers of my work like yourselves, we can begin to see how much of a difference this makes. How much of a difference does it make if the fonts are varied, if there are different colors, if there’s a typographical design? If there’s a certain amount of graphic aggregation of text, creation of text, what I call the “signiconic”:2 this melding of a literary form and a visual form? And what does that reveal? Strangely enough, this data on how few people are reading the digital is almost the best review I can ask for. It shows that there is a desire to have an experience with this book, that there is something there that is contained. There’s a new kind of vessel there that’s containing more of this experience than can be contained on a digital platform. But how we ultimately hold this work accountable is very difficult. Again, I have that one statistic. I have the comments from people who’ve read and written about it. Yet, even though House of Leaves was published sixteen years ago, it is still too early to tell what the effects of this will be. Is this just

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a fringe, experimental voyage or is there actually something substantial here that’s taking root, that is making sense of the visual culture we inhabit as well as the literary culture? IV: When Only Revolutions came out in 2006, you famously claimed that it was designed to be a book that “can’t exist online” (Rich 2006). But now, ten years later, there is in fact an e-book version (2015c). To what extent do you feel that this is the time for an e-book of Only Revolutions and are there certain medium-specific potentialities of the e-book that only now are interesting enough for you to undertake such a feat? MZD: That’s a good question. I think the experience with the Only Revolutions e-book, in order for it to even commence, I had to let go of the idea that we3 were going to recreate the experience of the bound book. That took almost a year of doing nothing, just to let go of that idea that it has to be the same as the book. That three-dimensionality I recognized could not be experienced in the e-book. So starting off with that project— and it did turn into a project, quite a big one—we started with a loss. We basically agreed that we can’t create this physical experience of watching the book, of watching the two characters get closer and closer together, for example, and then move past each other. But what we decided was, okay, we can offer something more that you couldn’t get in the book, for instance the road signs. You can easily pick certain points throughout the book and find an explanation and help you along the trail of their journey. And then the big decision was to forego the first page talking to the last page visually on the page and just to present them side by side so that you could actually see how Sam and Hailey were very like two lanes of a highway. And then there were other bells and whistles that we could add. I think that was very exciting. It’s still too early to tell how that experience will unfold for people. Only Revolutions takes a great deal of investment on the reader’s part. You need a lot of imagination. You need a lot of skill. One of the things I’ve been toying with recently as I’m finishing volume five of The Familiar is to actually create a kind of reader rating system that somehow alerts readers, like skiers, that you are on a difficult trail. Because I feel the way that books are currently presented, everyone assumes, or in some degree feels entitled to be able to read everything that’s put out there. And I feel it’s a disservice to people who are good readers, who spend a great deal of time reading difficult books and can make their way through hard texts. Only Revolutions is a very difficult book and it requires investment so that once you spend time with your copy and you’ve marked it with

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your notes, you become familiar with its patterns. It’s a lot to ask that of readers. And I don’t even know why they would necessarily want to go to the electronic version. So really, then, the electronic version is at present for new readers—unless they’re scholars, right? And how do those readers find their way to my text, when most readers who are aware of me, however they’re aware of me, seem predisposed to the print matter? So, they are probably the most experimental forms. We made the mistake of the electronic book: in achieving all that we did, we limited ourselves to one platform, which was the Apple OS platform. Well, no professor, for whom this book is perfectly suited, can assign that to their students because it exists only on one platform. Electronic books can only be required reading if they appear across all platforms. So we basically threw ourselves out of that conversation by attempting to achieve all that we achieved. And that’s disappointing, because in the end you realize just how unstable the digital platform is. Maybe that’s really the conversation, too. I think people, when they are addressing books that require rereading, that require notes, that enjoy rereadings, will probably move away from the digital. I’ve noticed that even myself. If I’m reading something that I feel is disposable I have no problem reading it on a tablet. But I’ve read a couple of scholarly books where I had a great time writing notes and highlighting, because I knew I could access those notes much more quickly and then I found that all of that notating was lost in some transition to another platform. So for me that was disheartening and I quickly reverted to print books. KD: One of the premises of this book on Book Presence in a Digital Age is that reports of the death of the book have been greatly exaggerated and that we have in fact seen a range of innovative approaches to the physicality of the book. Including yours, but also more radical forms of book art, where the book is only a physical object and no longer designed to be read: it is demediated, to use Garrett Stewart’s term. There is an obvious objection to this premise, however, that these are in fact symptoms of the imminent demise of the book. IV: Like a swan song. KD: Yes, that now people, yourself included, feel compelled to produce these monuments to the book as artifact, because we see it sailing off into the sunset. So in other words the renewed emphasis on book presence is fueled by a sort of mourning for the book as medium. Do you have a sense of this?

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MZD: I don’t have any of this attachment. You know, I think mourning about the book is sort of silly. Everyone has been talking about the demise of the novel for centuries, and I’m fine with all of it. If at some point in time a blogger ends up winning the Nobel Prize for literature, that’s fine. I have always opposed this idea that narratives need to be constrained by a certain form or format. Inherently, not because I’ve voiced my againstness, but simply because I’m constantly exploring and moving out—very much like a cat with territorial claims. What can this really contain and what can’t it? As an aside: I think we shouldn’t resist what’s occurring right now. Which is that, despite having all this wonderful technology, we still experience a lot of difficulties using it, as in this very Skype conversation.4 This is not unusual; we’re no aberration. Only in commercials for these services is everything perfect. Most people when they’re Skyping or whatnot are dealing with all these kinds of degradations. So the book has a long way to go still, because it’s incredibly durable and it’s incredibly resilient and its form as a package of time is also incredibly durable. And that’s where I’m in very scary, unknown territory. Granted, there are precedents. But to suddenly say to readers that I’m going to create twentyseven of these things, you know . . . I am making an enormous demand on people’s time. In some ways I’m limiting their choices and that could be seen as a positive thing, because sometimes it’s nice not to have to make a choice. But in some regards it’s a co-opting of their leisure time, if you will. The book is a handheld object that you would look at as being twenty to thirty hours of your time. Even though you held it and could instantly put it away and instantly open it, you knew the experience it was going to give you, it was a tactical kind of understanding. Therefore, I think it’s still a very powerful vehicle for containing and distributing the narratives. Talking about any of my books but The Familiar in particular, there is an immediate, quantifiable sense of what this thing is and how much time it’s going to take, how much space it’s going to require to store it, to display it. And yet at the same time, as radical as it is to create a tale that is encyclopedic in size, virtually, readers quickly become aware they can read a volume very quickly. The learning curve is steep. After reading the first two volumes, by the time people are in volume three or four it’s a binge reading on a weekend. So then in some ways it becomes the same novel we’ve always had. It’s much smaller, it’s much fleeter than maybe looks led one to expect.

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So there’s certainly the physical part that explores the cage of what the book is, the novel is, but then of course there’s the material itself. What happens when we’re exploring multiple voices? What happens when these voices have meta-observers that begin to participate and change in the shape of the “Narcons.”5 How do we locate this familiar family structure of mother and father and daughter and two sisters and a cat? It’s very simple. And yet, we have a stepfather, we have again sort of a wobbly nature to that format. Or we look at Luther’s family, the kind of game that he inhabits. As we begin to analyze this relationship between Jingjing and Tian Li—is it mother-son? is it a sponsor . . .? like, what kind of relationship is this? All these different relationships also have their correlating relationships to genre, whether it’s magical realism, or on-your-shoulder realism, how all those various genres, like sci-fi or horror, etc., begin to play out within the confines of this one book or series of books. And in their refusal to choose one over the other we can begin to explore how a much different way of viewing the world can be achieved. I think that is my constant quest, throughout all my books: to labor in the pursuit of an experience that a reader cannot have anywhere else. You can’t ultimately finish the book and say, I want to see the movie. You know the movie is not going to be a replacement for this experience and nothing else is. And that’s why you will keep returning to it, because no matter what scary movie you watch, there’s something about what House of Leaves does that none of those other forms can match. I think there are plenty of examples of books that don’t do that. People read them, they’re excited, but once they see the movie they’re happy just to stick with the movie or they had no desire to read the book in the first place. The question of how narratives are told and what the vessels or cages are that hold them is probably central to this discussion. Certainly The Familiar is quite literally often about the cage: characters feeling caged by their identities, whether it’s the color of their skin, the type of language they use. And maybe it’s good to be in your cage. It’s like you’re safer in the cage than out in the wild, but how do we find that? We are in the cage of this planet Earth. That’s very much the question of the novel as well. The cage provides us with something, it captures something and then it releases something. Probably that’s the next step of this conversation: What is contained that can be shared, that can be transported, that can be then freed for the reader? And I think that is my ultimate relationship with the reader: to take this huge narrative cage, and ultimately free that

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narrative within themselves. That’s the wonder of literature. To take the cage with the story and uncage the story in the name of the imaginative process that it releases within itself. IV: What you just said reminds me very much of the character Anwar, the father in The Familiar, who is working on a computer program, Paradise Open, which contains a lot of interesting glitches. Is Paradise Open a metaphor? MZD: It’s more than a metaphor because actually the code itself has a kind of life. The code itself is an example of yet another language that can produce communication within the text.6 You’re aware of that potential, which I think is probably the most important thing to impart when we look at texts, simply to understand their potential, that they are living things. That has not changed. When people look at text they understand that there is something impactful there. Even when they accept all the sudden legal jargon that’s imposed upon them when they get a software update, we sort of do it knowing that we will never read all of those fine points, but at the same time we are aware that there is a potential impact in that agreement. Text has that. So on one level you see a page of code and you accept that there is something there, but then if you write code you can also look at it and begin to realize that it stirs to life an animal that’s part of the zoo of The Familiar. Maybe the question with the digital is also that at present it just duplicates what is on the page. And that’s what we tried to avoid with Only Revolutions. But more robust systems in the future could potentially run those lines of code like a console. Your tablet would actually be kind of a co-conspirator in your reading, and the reader, though faced with thousands and thousands of choices, would begin to single out certain things that were important to her. So someone might not take the time to investigate the code, whereas another person might, and the computer could help facilitate what is revealed by that. The interesting question also is: Why don’t I just, instead of offering the lines of code, provide what the code does? That’s what Harry Potter does: we see what the spell does, we don’t get to know the kind of the articulate magic that’s supposedly going on. Because really, as important as the results are, they’re irrelevant if you really don’t know how that kind of life arises. It is by refusing to understand those kinds of processes that people get into trouble. It’s where superstition comes from, racism, it’s all the many problems that are currently plaguing my country. There has been just a simple denial of the necessary science that is behind the biological

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successes that we have in medicine, or the digital successes . . . that people can simply put all of that aside in the name of religious claims that simplify the world. You probably had the same experience when you took math at the early grades: there was a way of just learning how to answer the problem. You just plug in A and plug in B and you get an answer. But you really didn’t understand what was going on until you proved the theorem that resulted in that equation, in that proof. The Familiar is very much involved in that. It is for advanced readers. It is for readers who are strong and want to go beyond just the sort of razzle-dazzle, show me [only] the consequences of this. They want to understand the tinier aspects because that ultimately makes the reader stronger and more in possession of their imaginative faculties. KD: That goes back to what you were saying earlier about how you’re placing what some would call unreasonable demands on our time, that you’re looking for readers who are going to put in the work. I don’t know to what extent this came as a surprise to you—but with House of Leaves there was this huge online following on the forum. I was part of it at the time. But now I think to a certain extent some of the aspects, especially of The Familiar, seem to set up not just a single reader willing to put in the time, but also kind of a community of readers, some of whom might be able to speak Singlish and others who speak Spanish, and others who understand the code, and who will all work this out together . . . IV: A collective intelligence. KD: As a kind of hive mind, yes. MZD: I’m curious about your experience. Have you read the three volumes that are out? Did you read the third more quickly than the others? IV: Yes, I did. Then I reread it immediately, and I did the same with the first two volumes. Because I could only see where it was going after I had finished it. MZD: I always have to ask this question just to fact-check myself, because my claim is that the book itself begins to move toward an orb-like transparency, to use a metaphor or a trope from the book itself. For people who read the first one, it’s too opaque, too nonsensical. But then, as you move further and further along, the form itself begins to vanish. It becomes less significant. And, getting back to what you said, it’s more the subtle moments that begin to create the active experience. We can look all we want at the champagne bottle—the bottle’s important, but in the end

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we’re going to dwell more on the smell and the size of the bubbles and the fizz and all of that experience that we can actually take in. It will be interesting to see what the collective experience is of The Familiar and how far I’ll even get. I feel happy and content and excited by the prospects of actually bringing season one to a close with volume five, which is where I’m at right now. Even though I knew what was going to happen years ago I’m still intensely thrilled by the experience that I have had this last week as Xanther finally arrives at the name for the cat. And the circumstances by which that happens and how that begins to then bring at least in some way a kind of conclusion to this arc of naming and the significance of what names are. In some way we could look at it more broadly in terms of a certain type of language being a certain kind of naming. Whether it names creatures or the functionality on a computer or, you know, just the various habitats that we surround ourselves with or our various aggressions or fealties. These are all important. And when that choice is made, what are the ramifications? I think one of the things about House of Leaves, or any book for that matter, is that when you finish reading it, you feel a certain amount of confidence, pride, and even a kind of peace in that this experience has been settled simply by reaching an endpoint, whether you understand it or not. House of Leaves, along with all my work, destabilizes that, which I think is what keeps the forum alive. Yet, the tricky thing—and I’m curious what you think—is that The Familiar won’t grant that conclusion for over ten years, if it’s successful. How does that affect a community? In some ways it can become very much about anticipation, that’s one conversation: What will happen next? But in some ways it deters interpretation because there’s always the threat that what comes next will derange whatever the latest theory is. It really raises the bar on your interpretative skills. If you’re a good reader and a good analyzer you’ll realize that you have to create an analysis that is not contingent on what happens next. Which is a life problem, by the way: if we constantly want to view our lives in terms of how we will end our lives this is a very foolish direction. And yet most of us practice it. How do we actually make sense and meaning and find good will in our lives as we are now, and not predicate all of this existence on what’s going to happen next. That becomes problematic. That creates causalities that can range from the dictatorial

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control of authoritarian systems or the capitalist desire for growth. All of these can be larger problems that can stem from, believe it or not, a certain type of reading and a certain type of analysis of that reading. So why not create a form of reading that actually, as it goes deeper and deeper and seems to approach a kind of stillness, can create for the reader a kind of transparency, whereby the reader can actually enjoy what’s happening now, and not keep propelling him or herself into a nonexistent future. IV: The pleasure of interminable delay in storytelling is of course at least as old as Scheherazade. It also makes me think of nineteenth-century novelistic conventions of digression and the textual aside. In my research, I have described digressions in contemporary novels as devices that ward off the novel’s death (cf. van de Ven 2018). But, when it comes to forms of serial storytelling, a parallel between The Familiar and another medium presents itself: after all, we are currently experiencing the so-called Golden Age of television. To what extent do you think we might be overly familiar with this kind of experience because of television series like Mad Men or Game of Thrones? Do you think that we are trained in this kind of reading or interpreting without an apparent end in sight, by watching TV series that go on for ten seasons? (cf. van de Ven 2016). MZD: One of the great things about a story or a novel or even a thought is that it presents something that we at least momentarily accept as complete: It finds an argument, it resolves an argument, at least in its shape. And that remains a challenge for me. I believe that all of the volumes could be read independently of one another and enjoyed for what they offer. A quick way of looking at that is seeing what people quote from the book. They find meanings in the book that aren’t necessarily tied directly to the narrative. They find meaning in the relationships between the characters and those directions. But I think the great thing about academia is that it’s not a moribund practice. The institutions live because what’s brought to life there is not dead. We constantly need to revisit and revise how we teach reading and how we read ourselves. And I think we’re all, all three of us, privy to the experience. After all, the way I read differs simply by how old I am. It is very much like a music critic or a musician who becomes overly aware of how one song is so derivative of another, whereas a young kid wouldn’t recognize that song. They experience that song as vital and new, and yet we hear that song or read that book and know, “Oh wait a minute, I know

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exactly what this structure is. There’s going to be a couple of variations that briefly intrigue me, but that’s it.” Through my readers, and certainly when I go out on tour and I interact with a lot of young people, I can at least gauge what their experiences are and you can do the same with students. KD: I want to ask about the cats. Earlier, you referred to the book as a cage. And inside the cage, it seems to me, is obviously a cat—whether it’s a domestic cat or a panther. In one of the appendices to House of Leaves there’s the poem “The Panther” (2000, 559–60) which revolves around the figure of the cage and the panther’s restless circular pacing behind the bars—in an obvious nod to Rilke’s “Panther,” and, given that the poem also raises the problem of the name, perhaps also Borges’s “Other Tiger” (cf. 2000, 313). At any rate, now, sixteen years later in The Familiar, we have Xanther, who, I assume, is also kind of a Panther + x. And so, on the one hand, these feline presences seem to exert an influence on your work, or perhaps rather provide a kind of impetus for it. This was very obvious when The Familiar was first announced on the forum and all it said was that it would be about “a 12 year old girl who finds a kitten” (Hazel 2010) and that it would be twenty-seven volumes. We all thought: How can you possibly write twenty-seven volumes about that? Since then it’s become clear that each volume is going to be 880 pages long, so if you keep this up the whole thing will run to well over 20,000 pages. That’s got to be some kind of record. But somehow the sheer magnitude, the monumentality, of this project seems incommensurate with the premise—and this is obviously deliberate. At the same time, at the center of all of this book presence that you’re producing, these twenty-seven volumes, there is, as you yourself put it, also a particular feline absence. And this is an absence that has been there since House of Leaves as well (I’m thinking of Zampanò, who is surrounded by all these cats who then gradually disappear). So I guess the question is: What’s up with the cats? Or more to the point: What is the relationship, for you, between book presence and feline absence? MZD: Well, I love cats obviously. I have two great cats. Beyond that, it becomes incredibly complicated. And I even allow a randomness there. I love horses and dogs and all those kinds of distinctions are fascinating to me, but why I happen to ultimately settle on a cat is, you know, a result of coincidence, luck, affection, born out of my own sort of familial experiences with the animal and so on. On a literary level it’s hard to

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resist a cat that is in miniature, in a way, that we just don’t experience with any other sort of animal. This tiny little creature that can sit in your palm and yet demonstrates almost the same kind of behaviors as a 1,200 lbs. Siberian tiger. It’s that image of how symbolically something can be stretched. Victor Hugo’s friend said, “God created the cat so that men might pet the tiger.” And that’s one aspect of it. And then of course you have something that is carnivore, that’s a predator. You have something that constantly displays ludic behavior in your living room, chasing after little pieces of paper or running after a fallen acorn or whatnot. . . . So, as a topic it’s enormously rich. Yet it’s not in any sense original, especially if one considers the tradition, which I am aligned with, of Melville’s obsession with various aspects of the whale, or Thomas Pynchon’s obsession with the V2 rocket, or Joyce’s obsession with the city. It’s that kind of belief in detail. To me, the literary field is a quantum field. It is the belief that by looking at the atomic fizz of letters and words, these tiny variations have enormous consequences. The generalities of different forms of fiction, this atomizing of fiction, is very important. What I love, in season one, volumes one through five, is just the presence and non-presence of the cat. The fact that it’s clearly there, it’s clearly affecting Anwar, Astair, Xanther obviously, Jingjing, and Tian Li. There are rumors of cats and other characters that are coming in, and we feel the presence of something and we’re not entirely sure what it is. Now, from a narrative point of view, I do hold a lot of the cards. I know that I’ve mapped out the story from beginning to end. On the spine you can see literally the figure of a cat beginning to emerge. The tail is beginning to manifest itself, so we are at the start of the tail [tale?] graphically. We are alerted to that fact. You never want to grab a tiger by the tail. So there’s already a physical game that’s being played with the text itself. But as soon as we have this graphic imposition on the spine, on the spines of the book, on the covers of the book, that begin to denote what this is, we also have a curious absence. We have a cat that refuses to interact, really, beyond so much as a purring or maybe a squeak, but it seems to be dying, really, and it possesses almost no space, except in terms of the psychic space of the characters. In that respect, I regard the book literally as the familiar of the reader and as a familiar to the writer. In order for me to tell the story, as much as I may have mapped out where it’s going, it requires the participation, as alchemical as that is, with readers. Because, as the cat comes to life, the cat will begin to acquire the puissance of its readership.

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And this is the story that I always set out to write, it wasn’t the ego trip of Only Revolutions—the literal ego trip, the literal critique of the ego trip. This is very much the tail/tale of a cat, of our tale. How do we begin to create this story, you know? Sometimes it’s as literal as a reader saying, “You should read this book,” or “Have you seen this?” Sometimes it’s a lot more collective: “What is Mefisto doing?” or “What exactly is happening in the forest?” and “What are those blood spreads?” etc. Then there’s the larger marketplace, the larger global environment of how a book like this can survive. So, in some ways—and this gets back to the question of the expectation at the end versus knowing the end—the presence and the absence of the cat is very much the thesis of the twenty-seven-volume subject. You are positing the main concern and that’s what comes to an end in the end of [volume] five. But now, in volume six, the central question is: How will this cat begin to interact? And that will very much be influenced literally by how I see that cat interact in your lives, in the lives of other readers. What will be the result, as readers gather to this—or don’t? How will that help shape this creature? And that’s the exciting part. Because we don’t know.7

Notes 1 Cf. Jessica Pressman’s interview with Doug Beube and Brian Dettmer in this book. —Ed. 2 Danielewski uses the term “signiconic” (e.g., 2015a, 33) in reference to representations that combine text and image in order to “achieve a third perception no longer dependent on sign and image for remediating a world in which the mind plays no part” (Danielewski 2015b). 3 Danielewski’s consistent use of the first-person plural “we” points to the collaborative aspect of the production of his works. In the case of the e-book of Only Revolutions, this includes a team of designers, the digital production group at Random House led by Liisa McCloy-Kelley, and pianist Christopher O’Riley who composed the musical score. In The Familiar, this sense of multiple authorship is also evidenced by the “credit sequence” at the end of each volume, which includes references to several translators and a design team (Atelier Z) and production company (Circle Round a Stone). 4 During the interview, we had experienced various technical difficulties, particularly with the sound.

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5 “Narcon” is short for “Narrative Construct”: In The Familiar, the Narcons are mysterious intervening entities that can pause the narrative and comment on it. They consist of “nothing but numbers. Zeros and ones” and are “fractally locatable” (Danielewski 2015a, 565). They are programmed (though it remains unclear by what or whom) and operate according to a number of prescribed parameters. 6 Cf. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth’s contribution to this book. —Ed. 7 In early February, 2018, Danielewski announced on social media that the Familiar has been paused, owing to insufficient reader numbers “to justify the cost of continuing.”

Works cited Carrión, Ulises, 1980. “The New Art of Making Books.” In Second Thoughts, 6–22. Amsterdam: VOID Distributors. https://monoskop.org/log/?p=14521 Danielewski, Mark Z., 2000. House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon Books. Danielewski, Mark Z., 2006. Only Revolutions: The Democracy of Two. Set Out & Chronologically Arranged. New York: Pantheon Books. Danielewski, Mark Z., 2015a. The Familiar, Vol. 1: “One Rainy Day in May.” New York: Pantheon Books. Danielewski, Mark Z., 2015b. “The Familiar, Volume 1 Reader’s Guide.” http://www. penguinrandomhouse.com/books/213605/the-familiar-volume-1-by-mark-zdanielewski/9780375714948/readers-guide/ Danielewski, Mark Z., 2015c. Only Revolutions: Interactive eBook. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. iOS 4.3 or later; Mac OS X 10.9 or later. https://itunes.apple.com/ us/book/only-revolutions/id422526207 Danielewski, Mark Z. (@markdanielewski), 2018. “It is with a heavy heart that I must report THE FAMILIAR has been paused.” Twitter, February 2, 10:19 AM. https:// twitter.com/markdanielewski/status/959491469235994628 Hazel. 2010. “At Least This Explains All the Cat T-Shirts.” MZD Forums, September 15, 3:50AM. http://forums.markzdanielewski.com/forum/the-familiar/the-familiaraa/5860-at-least-this-explains-all-the-cat-t-shirts#post5860 Rich, Motoko, 2006. “Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry’s Rules.” New York Times, June 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/books/05digi.html van de Ven, Inge, 2016. “The Serial Novel in an Age of Binging: How to Read Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar. ” Image & Narrative 17 (4): 91–103. http://www. imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/1339 van de Ven, Inge, 2018. “Size Matters: Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 as (Anti-)Monumental Novels.” In Materializing Memories in Art and Popular Culture. Edited by László Munteán, Liedeke Plate, and Anneke Smelik, 106–22. London: Routledge.

Part Three

Conceptual Possibilities of the Book

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Learn to Read Differently Simon Morris

I am still alive. I am an artist living at the beginning of the twenty-first century, working in the digital age. I make work by reading or purposefully misreading the words of others, conducting these investigations with my tongue pressed firmly against the inside of my cheek. In 2003, the psychoanalyst Dr. Howard Britton referred to me as “philosophically irresponsible” (Britton 2003, 136–41) in a special edition of the French journal, the Revue d’esthétique, which examined the relationship between contemporary artists and philosophy. More recently, the English critic Robert Clark referred to me as “an inspired lunatic” (Clark 2010) in the Guardian newspaper in reference to an exhibition I had curated, entitled “The Perverse Library.” These playful epithets make reference to my experimental work with the book as a form ripe for examination in the digital age. Using art strategies, I test the very nature of the literary medium to find out what its limits are. My work tampers with language, its use and misuse, its presentation, and its reception. My work is intent on disrupting the triangulation between meaning, support, and context—the materiality of words and the materiality of the ground on which they are inscribed, the context that frames the meaning, the margins, the edges, the borderlines. In my creative practice, I aim to achieve an engaging interplay between word, context, and the medium of the page, as well as recording the current shift between the analogue and the digital. These playful interventions recognize reading and publishing as aesthetic acts, in and of themselves. This chapter examines four of my works of conceptual literature, proposing that they can be read as “conceptualist performed readings.” I set out the conceptual

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strategies used in The Royal Road to the Unconscious (2003), Re-Writing Freud (2005), Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (2010), and Pigeon Reader (2012). All of these works are self-published by “information as material” (iam), the publishing imprint I established in 2002 with a resolute commitment to DIY politics.

Introduction It may help to start by thinking about the artist’s relation to theory, which is different from that of the academic or the scientist. The artist is not trying to establish some law or rule based on reason. Quite the opposite: he or she is interested in the potential of the irrational, in celebrating the nonsensical. As the American artist Mark Dion pointed out in an interview: Artists are not interested in illustrating theories as much as they may be in testing them. This is why artists may choose to ignore contradictions in a text or choose to explode those contradictions. The art work may be the lab experiment which attempts equally as hard to disprove as prove a point. (Dion 1999, 39)

Figure 10.1 Simon Morris, The Royal Road to the Unconscious (York: Information as Material, 2003).

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It is also worth noting the artist may, or may not, know what they are doing. As the art critic David Sylvester observed in a conversation with Gilbert & George: “The artist works in order to find out how to do it” (1999). Nonetheless, Dion’s position statement would certainly find agreement with Sol Le Witt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” particularly sentence number five: “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically” (LeWitt 1992b: 837). LeWitt’s sentences resonate strongly for me as an artist, particularly his invocation to follow irrational thoughts logically.

The Royal Road to the Unconscious, 2003 I conceived of the project The Royal Road to the Unconscious in order to conduct an experiment on the writing in Sigmund Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). I had observed a contradiction in Freud’s work that I wished to explode. Freud investigates the realm of the unconscious, the space of the irrational,

Figure 10.2 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated and edited by James Strachey, assisted by Alan Tyson, revised by Angela Richards (Harmonsdworth: Penguin, 1985).

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but to do so he employs rational procedures such as syntax, grammar, and punctuation. The unconscious mind upsets the natural order of things. In dreams, objects can often appear the wrong size, words may be disconnected from their meanings, and ideas can seem arbitrary and unrelated. Freud explores these phenomena, but in words that are, themselves, highly considered, in sentences that are carefully constructed and through arguments that are deliberately crafted. I wondered, what would happen if I were to subject his altogether consciously produced text to an aleatory moment, a seemingly random act of utter madness? What would happen if we were to re-encounter his text as if in a dream-like state? And how might I undertake such a purposeful misreading of Freud’s work? The Royal Road to the Unconscious is the result of an extended dialogue and exchange of ideas with Dr. Howard Britton, a psychoanalyst who was enthusiastic to find out more about contemporary art. In 2001, Dr. Britton gave me a crash course in the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. One evening, in Spring 2002, I was reading Freud when I came across the following famous passage: In waking life the suppressed material in the mind is prevented from finding expression and is cut off from internal perception owing to the fact that the contradictions present in it are eliminated—one side being disposed of in favour of the other; but during the night, under the sway of an impetus towards the construction of compromises, this suppressed material finds methods and means of forcing its way into consciousness. Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. (Freud 1985, 768–69)

That last of these sentences stopped me in my tracks. I felt as if I had been physically tripped up by the combination of the words “royal” and “road” in Freud’s sentence. Those particular words gave me an idea. The way I make work is through reading or misreading of the words of others. Sometimes I get stuck on a particular word, a sentence or a longer passage of text. I end up a bit like a stuck record, repeating the same phrase over and over again. When this happens I feel an obligation to do something about it: to make a work. In this instance, Freud’s lexicon made me immediately think of another work by the American artist Ed Ruscha, entitled Royal Road Test (1967).

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Figure 10.3 Patrick Blackwell, Ed Ruscha, and Mason Williams, Royal Road Test, fourth edition (Los Angeles, 1980). Signed copy of the book gifted to me by Ed Ruscha.

I first encountered Ruscha’s book back in 1996; by 2002 his playful capers were but a distant memory; my journey back to Ruscha’s work was taken through Freud. In 1966, Ed Ruscha (Driver), Mason Williams (Thrower), and Patrick Blackwell (Photographer) drove 122 miles Southwest of Las Vegas, Nevada in a 1963 Buick Le Sabre. The desolate area is known as the Devil’s Playground. The weather was perfect. They were traveling along US highway 91 at a speed of 90 mph. The time was 5:07 p.m. when the writer Mason Williams threw a Royal (Model “X”) typewriter out of the window. Patrick Blackwell, the photographer, documented the scene of strewn wreckage. His documentation of the action was subsequently bound into a book, Royal Road Test. The book has become something of a cult classic and Ruscha is widely acknowledged as one of the first artists to make artworks in the form of books. This was not a book being used for the purpose of documenting an existing artwork but the book being employed as a container for an idea—which is the work itself. Like much conceptual art of the period, the work contains a minimal set of previously agreed instructions that the protagonists followed as they completed the action.

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Figure 10.4 The Devil’s Playground, double-page spread from Royal Road Test.

Utilizing Ed Ruscha’s Royal Road Test as a readymade set of instructions The chance of the words “royal” and “road” appearing in both Freud and Ruscha suggested, to me, a way of subjecting Freud’s text to a similarly random act of madness. It should be understood that I was using Ed Ruscha’s project as a readymade set of instructions in order to carry out a new experiment on Freud’s writing. This was in no way an attempt to repeat the work made by Ruscha. On the contrary, I wanted to use Ruscha’s Royal Road Test as a lens through which others could read Freud’s words differently. In Royal Road Test, Mason Williams threw a typewriter out of the window of a speeding car—for my reading experiment, it seemed perfectly illogical that words should follow. First, though Freud’s words would have to be disconnected from the logic of the “sentence” he had imposed on them. As Pablo Picasso is so often quoted as saying, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” Cutups provided me with necessary methodology to destroy (in order to recreate) Freud’s seminal work.

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However, I am far too lazy to cut-up 223,464 words all by myself. So, in 2013, as part of the preparations for the work, I invited my students to collaborate on the project with me, by cutting up Freud’s sentences into individual words. Seventy-eight students generously turned up, each brandishing a pair of scissors. This was crowd-sourcing for the purpose of a literary happening. Each student was given ten pages of text, the font of which had been blown up on a photocopier to 880 percent. It’s worth noting that I’m not bibliocidal and no books were harmed in the making of this work. My work is at the opposite end of the spectrum to Doug Beube and Brian Dettmer’s respective working methods, involving a remediation rather than a demediation. Obviously, by cutting up Sigmund Freud’s text, I was also directly referencing a whole history of cut-ups from Tristan Tzara in 1927 to Bryon Gysin and William Burroughs in the 1960s. Tzara had infamously cut one of his poems into single words and then performed the piece, on stage in a theater in Paris, by pulling the words out of a bowler hat and reading the words out loud in the random order that chance dictated. Gysin and Burroughs are celebrated for further developing the literary

Figure 10.5 Seventy-eight students from York College cutting up Professor Freud’s text, 2003. Photographs by Simon Morris.

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and artistic use of this technique. Here are some of William Burroughs’s own words about the magical potential of the cut-up technique: Any narrative passage or any passage, say, of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right.  Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one’s range of vision consequently expands. (1978, 4) The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. . . . The best writing seems to be done almost by accident . . . . You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors. (1978, 29)

During the making of this project, a phrase by the English poet John Keats kept spinning around my head: “That which is creative must create itself ” (1974, 238). I take this to mean that the art work must operate beyond the control of the artist who might establish the parameters of the project but not predetermine the eventual form of the work. Everything in the project had to be highly structured

Figure 10.6 Redbridge road, Crossways, Dorset, approximately 122 miles southwest of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical couch, double-page spread from The Royal Road to the Unconscious.

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and carefully planned in order to facilitate one brief moment of creative madness. All the further elements in the planning of the work were dictated by the logic of Ruscha’s instructions, which I used in much the same way as a poet would use stylistic devices or the rules of verse. John Keats defines the rationale. Sol le Witt provides the permission. Tristan Tzara supplies the method. Ed Ruscha presents the rules.

The location was approximately 122 miles southwest of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical couch (using Freud’s couch as a marker instead of Las Vegas, Nevada). The action occurred on a Sunday, as it did back in 1967. The weather was perfect, as it was thirty-six years ago. Ruscha’s project took place at 5:07 p.m.—our project took place at 7:05 a.m. (a safety consideration as much as a deliberate inversion of the original time—no

Figure 10.7 1963 Buick Le Sabre and 2002 Renault Clio, double-page spread from Royal Road Test and The Royal Road to the Unconscious, respectively.

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one would be around at 7 a.m. on a deserted Dorset country lane). The speed, however, remained the same. Ed Ruscha had driven the car at a speed of 90 mph along the desert highway. In order to subject Freud’s text to the aleatory moment, it was necessary to contravene certain rules, such as the national speed limit: Dr. Howard Britton drove at a speed of 90 mph along the small country lane in Dorset. The art critic Matthew Collings would later remark, “I really think you ought to slow down” (Collings 2003). By throwing Freud’s words out of the window of the car moving at speed, chance was allowed to enter the work. The eruption of words from the window of the speeding car produced a temporary escape from the rational, a brief celebratory moment of non-meaning. In the aftermath, I asked two photographers to act as ciphers of indifference and for the psychoanalyst Dr. Howard Britton, as a professional translator of the unconscious, to direct them toward any interesting moments in the reconfiguration of Freud’s words as they appeared newly scattered across Redbridge road and its surrounding flora. In a review of the project in the

Figure 10.8 Throwing Sigmund Freud’s words out of a car window from The Royal Road to the Unconscious.

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Figure 10.9 223,464 words traveling at 90 mph, from The Royal Road to the Unconscious.

American journal Art on Paper, Anne Dorothee Boehme writes beautifully about the images that resulted from the word distribution, making her own construction from the deconstruction of meaning: Just as dreams inhabit our sleep without any conscious interference and outside of our control, the scattered word scraps wash up as an immaculate wave of flotsam on the side of the road. These images are extremely evocative and of great celebratory quality, recalling the aftermath of ticker-tape parades, Mardi-Gras residue, or the surreal-ness of snow that has fallen at the wrong time of the year. The connection between the general phenomenon of a dream and the metaphorical authority of these individual word strips, now strewn along the road in abundance, is clear: both express themselves by simply being, effortlessly, and are unconcerned if their existence can be communicated to anyone else. Dreaming allows us to play with experiences that were gained during waking hours; we re-arrange and stabilize them and thus enjoy a form of liberated, poetic, thinking that might in fact be the least repressed. Engaged in a nocturnal process of sorting and categorizing, we add seemingly illogical text and thought fragments to existing mental patterns. (2004, 82–83)

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Figure 10.10 The surrealness of snow that has fallen at the wrong time of the year, from The Royal Road to the Unconscious.

Figure 10.11 Fever and Night-terrors, from The Royal Road to the Unconscious.

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The Royal Road to the Unconscious is an analogue work that explores the materiality of language, from the words on the page to the material support of the paper that holds them in place. But, having never actually read Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in its entirety—having recently thrown the contents of the book out of a car window traveling at high speed instead—I decided that my next project should be to rewrite it.

Re-writing Freud, 2005 For Re-Writing Freud, I worked with the creative technologist Christine Farion to rewrite Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s book was fed into a computer program designed by Christine Farion. The text was taken from an online 1913 English translation by A. A. Brill that was outside of copyright restrictions. In taking digitized text from one place and literally pouring it into another form, I was well aware of Kenneth

Figure 10.12 Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud (York: Information as Material, 2005).

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Figure 10.13 Simon Morris (artist) and Christine Farion (creative technologist), Interactive touch screen kiosk reprocessing Freud’s text for the exhibition, An Art of Readers, curated by Yann Serandour, Galerie Art & Essai, Université Rennes 2, France, 2005.

Goldsmith’s own ruminations on the malleability of digitized text. As he notes in a conversation with the literary critic Marjorie Perloff: Now, once language is digitized, its transportative and morphic tendencies are foregrounded. Great chunks of language have been melted and are free to assume a myriad of forms. In a way, it highlights the formal properties of language more than has ever been realized before. (Perloff 2003)

The program randomly selected words one at a time from across Freud’s text and began to reconstruct the entire book, word by word, making a new book with the same words in the process. The algorithm worked by recognizing individual words and the punctuation and spaces either side as individual fields. In other words, the program worked by using the gaps between the words. It would remove each field, randomize the order of the individual units, and then redistribute them. This work has been displayed in galleries and museums in a wall-mounted, touchscreen kiosk with attached printer, as well as an App version. While the

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Figure 10.14 Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, adjacent to Simon Morris’s Re-Writing Freud.

text was being randomly rewritten, it could also be reprinted and published. It took approximately seventy-eight hours to rewrite Freud’s 223,624 word text. It is possible to see a direct relation between The Royal Road to the Unconscious and Re-Writing Freud. The former I view as the physical separation of language (analogue edition) and the latter as the virtual separation of language (digital edition). “The spattered text” in The Royal Road to the Unconscious—described by Stephen Bury as “the blood of Ruscha’s typewriter”—has now been picked up off the asphalt of Redbridge road and thrown back onto the rewritten page in Re-Writing Freud (2004, 39). The benefits for the potential audience were the opportunity to engage with an interactive art work that utilized technology and new media. The spectator soon realized that he or she could authorize their own rewriting of Freud’s work, taking control of the work and print directly from the screen by using the touch-sensitive interface. By pressing play and pause, they too could intervene in Freud’s original text, rupture it, interrupt it, create new poetic or nonsensical juxtapositions, and return it to us in a new order.

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Having realized a digital version of Re-Writing Freud, I was also interested to see the rewritten text poured back into the form of a physical book. I set about putting the randomly selected, digitized language back into the typographic layout found in the 1976 Penguin edition of Freud’s work, replicating its chapter divisions and the length of its paragraphs. This intentional close attention to the design of the host copy I refer to as “undesigning”; I have heard others call it “brandjacking.” In the gallery there were two bound copies of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. The first was the “conventional” publication written by Freud and the second one was the rewritten version. To create the first published edition of Re-Writing Freud (edition of 1000) I worked closely with the Master printers Imschoot in Belgium. Craig Dworkin, professor in the Department of English at the University of Utah, edited the publication and wrote an editor’s introduction entitled “Grammar Degree Zero,” in which he observed: Language simply cannot help itself. And we realise, reading this book, that we can’t do anything for it. It is through and not in spite of its methods that “the book dreams” of the “coherence of nonsensical” “chance activity”. In precisely those moments of this text where even the screen of chance cannot prevent two adjacent words from unexpectedly making sense, or suggesting a common unwritten third term, where themes emerge like shared secrets between certain words, where the very materiality meant to obviate reference only allows language to point back to itself in a series of differences and repetitions, in the rubbing of one word against the next, we catch language in its ceaseless symptomatic acts and assignations: dangerous idiomatic liaisons, anxious avoidances, teasing connotations, flirtations with syntax, illicit frissons, incestuous marriages of words with shared etymological lineages, narcissistic mirrorings, and all the perverse and unnatural combinations of aberrant ungrammatical coupling we cannot, as readers, resist seeing as such. Don’t look away—for therein lies the lesson of the aleatory text: so many graces of fate, so many fates of grace. (2005, 7) The reader who responds to this book by complaining that it is nonsensical is neither right nor wrong, but asking the wrong question, posing an impossible problem in response to this book’s insistent imaginary solution. (ibid., 3)

I had dreamed of making an unreadable book, of taking words back to Jacques Lacan’s concept of lalangue, moving them from the representational to the abstract. As it was, the audience for Re-Writing Freud thwarted this ambition by stubbornly reading the rewritten text. When one word is placed next to another,

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Figure 10.15 Double-page spread from Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud.

meaning is suggested. The syntactical certainty of Freud’s sentences has been ruptured by the aleatory process, but still flashes of meaning persist, haunting the text. Despite achieving an emancipation of syntax through its digital procedure, the book remains stubbornly present in its reconfigured state.

Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head, 2010 Kenneth Goldsmith is one of the key protagonists in conceptual writing, and in 2007 I made the first film of him and his work, entitled sucking on words, which was premiered at the British Library and was shown in the program of the Oslo Poetry Festival, 2007. Presented alongside the DVD edition was a short booklet with a text written by Goldsmith. In the process of proofing this text repeatedly for publication, I read the following anecdote several times: A few years ago I was lecturing to a class at Princeton. After the class, a small group of students came up to me to tell me about a workshop that they were taking with one of the most well-known fiction writers in America. They were complaining about her lack of imagination. For example, she had them pick their favorite writer and come in next week with an “original” work in the style of that

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Figure 10.16 Simon Morris, Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (York: Information as Material, 2010). author. I asked one of the students which author they chose. She answered Jack Kerouac. She then added that the assignment felt meaningless to her because the night before she tried to “get into Kerouac’s head” and scribbled a piece in “his style” to fulfill the assignment. It occurred to me that for this student to actually write in the style of Kerouac, she would have been better off taking a road trip across the country in a ’48 Buick with the convertible roof down, gulping Benzedrine by the fistful, washing ’em down with bourbon, all the while typing furiously away on a manual typewriter, going 85 miles per hour down a ribbon of desert highway. And even then, it would’ve been a completely different experience, not to mention a very different piece of writing, than Kerouac’s. Instead, my mind drifted to those aspiring painters who fill up the Metropolitan Museum of Art every day, spending hours learning by copying the Old Masters. If it’s good enough for them, why isn’t it good enough for us? I would think that should this student have retyped a chunk—or if she was ambitious, the entirety—of On the Road. Wouldn’t she have really understood Kerouac’s style in a profound way that was bound to stick with her? I think she really would have learned something had she retyped Kerouac. But no. She had to bring in an “original” piece of writing. (Goldsmith 2007, 6–7)

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This theoretical proposition stuck with me and I thought: Why not? Let’s realize this as an art work. Let’s copy Kerouac’s text, from start to finish, a book I had never read. Although copying the words of others can be met with some resistance (and even rare cases of spluttering outrage) from those schooled in the more traditional creative model, there are several important thinkers who have recognized the value of copying the words of others. Walter Benjamin extolled the virtues of copying: The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. The airplane passenger see only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands . . . . Only the copied text commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits to its command. (1978, 66)

Gertrude Stein suggested that the only real way to know a book is to copy it: “I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading never can do” (1990, 113). The celebrated author W. G. Sebald allegedly gave the following advice to his creative writing students: “I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt” (qtd. in Wershler 2013, 340; cf. Lambert and McGill 2009, 9). James Joyce, billed as the Shakespeare of modernism, wasn’t immune to borrowing from others either: “I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man,” Joyce told the American composer George Antheil, “for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description” (1966, 1:297). And even writing what is typically considered “original” material might, in fact, involve ventriloquizing someone else’s words, as in this humorous case described by the author Mark Twain:

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Oliver Wendell Holmes .  .  . was .  .  . the first great literary man I ever stole anything from—and that is how I came to write to him and he to me. When my first book was new, a friend of mine said to me, “The dedication is very neat.” Yes, I said, I thought it was. My friend said, “I always admired it, even before I saw it in The Innocents Abroad.” I naturally said: “What do you mean? Where did you ever see it before?” “Well, I saw it first some years ago as Doctor Holmes’s dedication to his Songs in Many Keys.” . . . Well, of course, I wrote to Dr. Holmes and told him I hadn’t meant to steal, and he wrote back and said in the kindest way that it was all right and no harm done; and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves. (Sacks 2013)

The precedents are undoubtedly there, throughout history. What makes copying today distinct, however, are the digital tools and the networks of the internet, which make possible shifting large chunks of language from one place to another in an instant. In the digital age heaps of language—to borrow from Robert Smithson—are reorganized, remediated, and reconstructed all the time. In the process, the distinction between the writer and machine is becoming increasingly blurred. At one extreme, there is Andy Warhol, who “want[ed] to be a machine,” (Swenson 1963, 26) his idea developed further by Christian Bök as “robopoetics.” Bök’s concept refers to a condition where “the involvement of an author in the production of literature has . . . become discretionary” (2002, 10). He asks, “Why hire a poet to write a poem when the poem can in fact write itself?” (ibid.). Bök’s bleak prediction for our literary future is that we are probably the first generation of poets who can reasonably expect to write literature for a machinic audience of artificially intellectual peers. Is it not already evident by our presence at conferences on digital poetics that the poets of tomorrow are likely to resemble programmers, exalted, not because they can write great poems, but because they can build a small drone out of words to write great poems for us? If poetry already lacks any meaningful readership among our own anthropoid population, what have we to lose by writing poetry for a robotic culture that must inevitably succeed our own? If we want to commit an act of poetic innovation in an era of formal exhaustion, we may have to consider this heretofore unimagined, but nevertheless prohibited, option: writing poetry for inhuman readers, who do not yet exist, because such aliens, clones, or robots have not yet evolved to read it. (ibid., 17)

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Or as Bök puts it, referencing Calvino in an earlier section of the same essay, perhaps we can use algorithms to extend the lives of dead poets and create an ever-extending series of posthumous works: Calvino (a member of Oulipo) remarks that every author is already a “writing machine,” producing literature according to a set of involuntary constraints that, under rational analysis, might be codified into a set of adjustable algorithms. Oulipo implies that, when computers begin to reveal the stylistic constants of an author, we might begin to emulate these idiosyncrasies of diction and grammar, thereby manufacturing an automatic, but convincing, facsimile that might conceivably extend the career of a writer into the afterlife of postmortem creativity. (ibid., 11)

As if anticipating this robopoetic future, in the 1950s the notorious journalist Hunter S. Thompson used to retype Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s novels: “He chose, rather than writing original copy to re-type books like The Great Gatsby and a lot of Norman Mailer, than Naked and the Dead, a lot of Hemingway. He would sit down there on an old type-writer and type every word of those books and he said, ‘I just want to know what it feels like to write these words’” (qtd. in Spencer 2014). Thompson’s literary workouts explored a complex relationship between typing and writing as it is determined by the ways in which we engage with the machine. Central to Thompson’s project is the desire to embody the experience of pressing the metallic keys of the typewriter, as if staging a peculiar re-performance of the acts of Fitzgerald’s or Hemingway’s writing, hammering the words onto the space of the page until mechanical typing assumes the quality of creative writing. Here, copying what one loves results in eventually finding oneself in the writing. As Yohji Yamamoto put it, “Start copying what you love. Copy, copy, copy. And at the end of the copy, you will find yourself ” (qtd. in Goldsmith 2015). The machines might be changing the way we engage with or think about writing, but the writer continues to be present in our new media age, navigating the complex landscape of writing as rewriting at the contemporary Iterative Turn; a turn toward writing as rewriting in a culture of ubiquitous “‘re’-gestures—such as reblogging and retweeting” (Goldsmith 2011, xix). As the literary theorist Kaja Marczewska has noted, unlike copying traditionally understood, iteration “recognises the creative potential of copying. Iteration . . . represents a tendency to repeat available material as a creative gesture; as an extension rather than a synonym of copying and appropriating. .  .  . Thinking about creative practice

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as iterative necessitates a completely new set of questions, which .  .  . define contemporary attitudes to creativity and the cultural moment that breeds them . . . the moment [described here] as the Iterative Turn” (2016, 19). My copying process was carefully considered. I decided to blog the book using Jack Kerouac’s legendary Original Scroll from 1951 which had finally been published in 2007. This was just as Allen Ginsberg had predicted: the unedited version would only be published after all the main characters, including himself, had died. This is the version in which Kerouac hammered away a 120,000-word novel in twenty-one days flat on a typewriter. He felt that even changing the sheet of paper would interrupt the flow of his prose. So, he stuck 120 feet of tracing paper together to make a scroll and typed continuously. He worked so fast, he had had to change his sweaty t-shirt regularly and friends said that the sound of the bell ringing as the carriage in the typewriter slid back and forth was going so fast, it sounded like the doorbell. After twenty-one days of this, he rang up his publisher in New York City, declaring: “I’ve done it.” His publisher asked: “What have you done?” Kerouac replied: “I’ve finished On the Road.” His publisher said: “Well, bring it on over and show it to me then.” Kerouac sped across Manhattan and up the flights of stairs to his publisher’s office. As he walked through the door, he threw the scroll at him. The scroll unfurled as it sailed across the room. His publisher picked it up and said to Kerouac: “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” It was a further six years before On the Road finally appeared in print. My version was typed slowly and deliberately in direct contrast to Jack’s expressive act. I typed a page a day as a form of meditation, proofing each page and then posting it on a blog. With a blog, each subsequent post supersedes the previous one, pushing the posts further down the thread as you go, so the first post becomes the last post, etc. It took the best part of a year to retype Kerouac’s book from start to finish. I started on Saturday May 31, 2008 with the opening sentence: “I first met met Neal not long after my father died . . .” and I finished, 297 pages later on Tuesday March 24, 2009 with the classic line: “I think of Neal Cassady, I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found, I think of Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady.” It should be noted that in my copying odyssey, I made an error in my replication of the very first line in Kerouac’s book. The first line of Keroauc’s text from the Original Scroll edition contains a double “met.” Proofing my first page of copying, I deleted the second “met” thinking I had written it by mistake for a second time. Howard Cunnell, the English editor of Kerouac’s Original Scroll, said the double “met” is on the scroll

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and he left it in, because it sounded to him like a car misfiring at the start of a journey. Shifting from the digital to the analogue, I then poured the rewritten language back into the form of the book. But, with the first blog post having become the last post, my version was now going backward. If Jack was traveling from the East Coast to the West, I was now traveling from the West to the East in reverse and a reader would have to read my edition in the Arabic or Japanese manner: from right to left. Using the method of undesigning, I wanted the analogue version to closely reference the recent UK edition of Kerouac’s novel. In relation to the cover image, there are some technical details an attentive reader might enjoy. My friend Nick Thurston is taller than me so I had to stand on a bucket to get the height right for the cover shot. The clothes we’re wearing were borrowed from the local Tesco superstore chain; afterward we took them back, claiming they didn’t fit! Undesigning is employed on the back cover, too: I used the space as an opportunity to promote a number of my other titles/bookworks. I think of the differences between the Penguin edition of Kerouac’s novel and my own edition like this: one is a work of literature which you are supposed to read, the other is a work of art that you are supposed to think about. One requires a readership and the other requires a thinkership. Then, a London artist called Joe Hale decided to retype my edition and release his version, titled Getting Inside Simon Morris’ Head. By retyping my edition,

Figure 10.17 Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, 1957, Simon Morris’ Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head, 2010, and Joe Hale’s Getting Inside Simon Morris’ Head, 2014.

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posting it as a blog daily for almost a year, and then pouring it back into the form of a book, Joe put Kerouac’s text back in the right order. So here are all three editions together: On the Road, Getting Inside Jack Keroauc’s Head, and Getting Inside Simon Morris’ Head. A year later in 2011, the artist Richard Prince presented his facsimile hardback first edition of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye in which he removed every mention of Salinger’s name from the work, replacing it with his own name, Richard Prince. The work was referred to as a sculptural edition and it clearly states that it is art rather than literature. It was a dead-ringer through and through for Salinger’s text—not a word was changed—with the exception that the following disclaimer was added to the colophon page: “This is an artwork by Richard Prince. Any similarity to a book is coincidental and not intended by the artist.” The colophon concluded with: © Richard Prince.

Pigeon Reader, 2012 This final bookwork riffs off a wonderful collection of experimental prose by the French writer Georges Perec, entitled Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. But the game it is playing has precedents in the work of Marcel Broodthaers and Rodney Graham. In 1969 Marcel Broodthaers conducted an interview with his publisher Richard Lucas on a dust-jacket which he then wrapped around a novel by Alexandre Dumas entitled Twenty Years After (the sequel to The Three Musketeers), taking on authorship of the publication by occluding the name of Dumas. In 1991, Rodney Graham, created his Dr No insert. He had designed and produced a bookmark with text that can be inserted between pages 56 and 57 of the original first edition of the Ian Fleming classic to extend and loop a scene in which a poisonous centipede traverses Bond’s naked body. As a reader, by inserting the bookmark, you could extend James Bond’s torture for another couple of pages. Although these are, without doubt, brilliant works that have been beautifully executed, manufacturing a dust-jacket or a bookmark remains a rather cost-effective exercise. Who would take this move further, reproducing an entire 301-page book, just to make an intervention in a single 12-page chapter? Note that in British copyright law, in academia, you are allowed to copy 5 percent of a text so long as you leave 95 percent of the text alone. Who would be crazy enough to purposefully reverse this equation, and make an exacting

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Figure 10.18 Simon Morris, Pigeon Reader (York: Information as Material, 2012).

copy of 95 percent of someone else’s novel just to alter 5 percent (one chapter)? Well, that would be me. Georges Perec was commissioned by an architect to write the Species of Spaces essay, as the table of contents suggests: The Page, The Bed, The Bedroom, The Apartment, The Apartment Building, The Street, The Neighbourhood, The Town, The Countryside, The Country, Europe, The World, Space. It’s a bit like when you were a child and would write a letter to a friend, addressing it to So and So on Something Street, Planet Earth, Outer Space. But John Sturrock, the editor who put this English collection together, threw in some superb further pieces too, including “Reading: A Socio-physiological Outline.” I happened to be reading this particular text by Perec on the activity of reading when I tripped over the following sentence: “Reading is like a pigeon pecking at the ground in search of breadcrumbs.” And, once again, I was stuck, stuck like a stuck record. In an interview with Willoughby Sharp made in 1973, Ed Ruscha said (in reference to the artist’s books he published in the 1960s) that all his work aimed for producing “a kind of a ‘Huh?’”:

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ER: I realized that for the first time this book had an inexplicable thing I was looking for, and that was a kind of a “Huh?” That’s what I’ve always worked around. All it is, is a device to disarm somebody with my particular message. Lots of artists use that. WS: Give me some examples of “Huh?” ER: I don’t know, somebody digging a hole out in the desert and calling it sculpture. (Sharp 2002, 65) In a statement for an exhibition at Les Abbatoirs art museum in Toulouse, France, entitled, A kind of “huh”? the curators Jérôme Dupeyrat and Maïwenn Walter further analyzed the “huh” effect: “Huh?”: this onomatopoeia stands for “What is it?”, “Why?”, “What does it mean?”, etc. These questions, which seem to express incomprehension or misunderstanding, which seem to testify a loss of criterion, can be paradoxically positive and constructive, because through doubt and questioning, the “huh?” effect is in fact a driving force of the process of aesthetic reception. Any artwork can provoke a “huh?” effect and anybody can feel this effect in various degrees when looking, reading or hearing an artwork. The “huh?” effect is particularly active in artworks which are defined by oscillations between the obvious and the indecipherable, the trivial or the commonplace and the strange and the unexpected, between sense and nonsense, logic and absurdity, between what the artwork shows and what it says. (Dupeyrat and Walter 2012)

The power of this effect was enough, according to Ruscha, “to knock you on your ass” (Sharp 2002, 66). I think the contemporary version of this expression is WTF (what the fuck?). And, that, I believe is the effect you should be trying to elicit from your readers when they engage with this expanded form of literature. Note the proportions the “huh?” effect can take: in March, 2013 I was giving a talk on experimental literature in Prague in the Czech Republic. I spoke about how, to date, I’ve published ten books, but not a single word of them is my own. How I’m involved in the conceptual writing movement that blurs the boundaries between art and literature. How I use the existing words of others (extant material)—how I select them and reframe them to generate new meanings— and, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things. After my talk, my host George (a beautiful man who is the spitting image of the Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti; Moretti’s face breaking into a smile in Dear Diary is probably the most joyful cinematic image I’ve ever seen) seemed concerned. He asked me the same

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question repeatedly: “Do you ever get extreme reactions to your talk?” I shrug him off: “Not really—it’s only words after all!” Later, after a few beers at Hotel Akropolis, George told me what was on his mind. He said, “I didn’t want to tell you earlier in case I offended you, but now, after a few beers, I don’t really care.” George went on to explain what had transpired at the end of my lecture: a student had approached George in a very agitated state. He was bright red in the face and his chest was heaving, he was so furious. He spluttered, “How . . . could . . . you . . . invite . . . a . . . professional . . . plagiarist . . . to . . . talk . . . to . . . us?” George tried to explain the work of Sherrie Levine and the methodologies of appropriation art to the student, which only made the student even angrier. George then tried a different tack and said, “Why didn’t you ask Simon a question in the Q&A, tell him what was on your mind?” The student replied, “I couldn’t . . . I was too upset . . . I couldn’t talk to him . . . I would have punched him in the face.” The strategies I use—rewriting, copying, or the cut-up—are not about disrespect, however. On the contrary, I love literature. It is out of love that I want to find out what is possible to do with the medium: to read it differently, to experiment with every possible permutation of what a work of literature can possibly be in order to squeeze as much meaning as I can from it. This, in my opinion, presents a justification for testing the boundaries of language in order to take possession, more certainly, of language itself. In the current information age, the digital postliterate age, the function of poetry is no longer one of collective memory or the projection of the individual voice (the emphasis now is on “shareware”), but can now, instead, focus on the malleability of language: its temporality; its ephemeral nature; its physicality; its dynamism; its fluidity; and its structures. In the digital age, poetry’s function is to examine the means of transmission, exposing the frame of language, the container that creates meaning—how language is stored, viewed, and moved from one context to another. In considering this, the digital age sees a renewed engagement between speech, reading, and writing. The cover of my new edition of Species of Spaces looks exactly the same as the existing version except for the Penguin logo, which has transformed into a pigeon, and that emblazoned across the cover in bright yellow are the words: “Pigeon Reader.” The content of the book repeats the Penguin edition exactly, except for the chapter on reading. When you get to page 174, you will find his text is being read by a pigeon.

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Figure 10.19 Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1997 and Simon Morris’s Pigeon Reader, 2012.

Figure 10.20 Double-page spread from Simon Morris’s Pigeon Reader, pp. 176–77.

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Figure 10.21 Double-page spread from Simon Morris’s Pigeon Reader, pp. 180–81.

And then, twelve pages and pigeons later, the text resumes as normal. Professor Anne Moeglin-Delcroix told me that translated from English (Pigeon Reader) into French (Lecteur Pigeon), my title means (±) that the reader has been had (has been conned). What games are being enacted in this edition of Perec’s work and for what purpose? In reprinting the entire book, I wanted to move beyond the established tradition of the artist’s insert. Through staging this intervention in the work of another, my aim was put pressure on all of the terms in Perec’s title: to ask what it means to engage with a text physically—looking at print, flipping pages, processing language, vocalizing, responding—without any of the social practices or semantics we usually associate with “reading.” Or, to put it as Ludwig Wittgenstein might: to ask what activities might still perform a grammar of reading even in the absence of what would seem to be its defining features. But perhaps the simplest answer would be to appropriate and recontextualize Perec’s closing words in “Reading: A Socio-physiological Outline”: “These are questions that I ask, and I think there is some point in a writer asking them.”

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Conclusion To conclude, I would like to turn to a description coined by Nick Thurston, my friend and co-editor of information as material: Conceptualist Performed Readings. I think Thurston’s collaging of these three distinct terms may be useful for understanding how artists such as ourselves are approaching literature. In Thurston’s compound descriptor, the first term relates to our privileging of the concept in the making of the work. As Sol LeWitt maintained in his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, which appeared in 1967: “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art” (1992a, 834). This extends to the engagement with the work as well: in its subsequent reading or thinking about. The performance is manifested in the physicality of our engagement with extant material, in how we use the existing words of others. These engagements may involve rewriting, rereading, or misreading of the source material. But the emphasis is always on reading: on these strategies as extensions of the act of reading, which we take to be an aesthetic experience in, and of itself. Reading is usually a private act, but our performed readings are always intended as public works. They are consciously made to be shared. It is important to understand that the work’s reproducibility and performativity are built into its mode of production. The explicit intention is to make a reading act, on the understanding that what we are going to present will be an artwork, and where the works we produce ask questions about what kind of reading has gone on and what kind of reading they are now inviting, permitting or demanding.

Works cited Benjamin, Walter, 1978. “One Way Street (selection).” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited and with an introduction by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott, 61–94. New York: Schocken Books. Boehme, Anne Dorothee, 2004. “(Intentionally) Scattered Thoughts.” Art on Paper 8 (4): 82–83. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24559707 Bök, Christian, 2002. “The Piecemeal Bard Is Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Potential Robopoetics.” Object 10: 10–18. http://www.ubu.com/papers/object/03_bok.pdf Britton, Howard, 2003. “Simon Morris: Philosophiquement Irresponsable.” Translated by Dominique Férault. In “Les artistes contemporains et la philosophie,” edited by Anne Mœglin-Delcroix, special issue of Revue d’esthétique 44 (3): 137–42. Burroughs, William S. and Gysin, Brion, 1978. The Third Mind. New York: Viking Press. Bury, Stephen, 2004. “On the Royal Road.” Art Monthly, no. 274: 39.

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Clark, Robert. 2010. “The Guide: New Exhibitions.” The Guardian, October 16. Collings, Matthew, 2003. Personal email correspondence with the author. Dion, Mark, 1999. “Field Work and the Natural History Museum.” In The Optic of Walter Benjamin. Edited by Alex Coles, 38–57. London: Black Dog. Dupeyrat, Jérôme and Maïwenn Walter, curators, 2012/13. A Kind of “Huh?” Exhibition. November 8, 2012 to March 23, 2013. Les Abbatoirs, Toulouse, France. http://www.lesabattoirs.org/expositions/kind-huh Dworkin, Craig, 2005. “Grammar Degree Zero.” In Re-Writing Freud, 1–8. York: Information as Material. Freud, Sigmund, 1913. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by A. A. Brill. London: George Allen. http://www.bibliomania.com/2/1/68/115/frameset.html. Freud, Sigmund, 1985. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated and edited by James Strachey, assisted by Alan Tyson, revised by Angela Richards. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gilbert & George, 1999. “Gilbert & George with David Sylvester.” In The Rudimentary Pictures, n.pag. Exhibition catalog. Milton Keynes: Milton Keynes Gallery. Goldsmith, Kenneth, 2007. “A Week of Blogs for the Poetry Foundation.” Reproduced as a 12-page pamphlet inside the DVD Sucking on Words: Kenneth Goldsmith, directed by Simon Morris. Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications. Goldsmith, Kenneth, 2011. “Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now?’ In Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, xvii–xxii. Evanson, IL: Northwestern University Press. Goldsmith, Kenneth, 2015. “I Look to Theory Only When I Realize That Somebody Has Dedicated Their Entire Life to a Question I Have Only Fleetingly Considered.” Poetry Magazine, April 1. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/ articles/detail/70209. Joyce, James. 1966. The Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann, 3 vols. New York: Viking. Keats, John, 1974. A Selection from John Keats. Edited by E. C. Pettet, New York: Longman. Lambert, David and McGill, Robert, 2009. “Writing Tips: The Collected ‘Maxims’.” Five Dials, no. 5: 8–9. http://fivedials.com/files/fivedials_no5.pdf LeWitt, Sol, 1992a. “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” In Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 834–37. Oxford: Blackwell. LeWitt, Sol, 1992b. “Sentences on Conceptual Art.” In Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 837–39. Oxford: Blackwell. Marczewska, Kaja, 2016. “The Iterative Turn.” Parse Journal, no. 3: 13–28. http:// parsejournal.com/article/the-iterative-turn/

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Perloff, Marjorie, 2003. “A Conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith.” Jacket Magazine, no. 21. http://www.jacketmagazine.com/21/perl-gold-iv.html Sacks, Oliver, 2013. “Speak, Memory.” The New York Review of Books, February 21. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/02/21/speak-memory/ Sharp, Willougby, 2002. “‘. . . A Kind of a Huh’: An Interview with Ed Ruscha.” In Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages. Edited by Alexandra Schwartz, 64–72. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Spencer, Brian John, 2014. “Hunter S. Thompson—Typing Out the Work of the Best Writers.” The New Irishman, June 5. http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/ hunter-s-thompson-typing-out-work-of.html. Stein, Gertrude, 1990. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Vintage. Swenson, Gene R., 1963. “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part 1: Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol.” ARTnews 62 (7): 24–27, 59–64. Wershler, Darren, 2013. “Conceptual Writing as Fanfiction.” In Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World. Edited by Anne Jamison, 333–41. Dallas, TX: Smart Pop.

11

Emoji Dick and the Eponymous Whale Lisa Gitelman

I This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience! (Melville 1988, 193) A book. Its author, Herman Melville (1819–91). Its title, Emoji Dick; or, The Whale (2010), only instead of the words “the whale” picture an enlarged and therefore pixilated emoji—the spouting whale—a version of what might appear in a web browser or on an Apple device but not (sorry) a version that can yet appear easily in the word-processing software I used to write these words or (sorry again) on an Android device, where it would look a little different. Emoji Dick is a book that in a real sense cannot be fully named, since an accurate rendering of its title includes an image. Cataloguers at the Library of Congress settled, as I have, on the title Emoji Dick, or, The Whale, only with a slight change in punctuation, replacing the author’s semicolon with a comma to conform to bibliographical tradition. No big deal. Punctuation is “accidental” not “substantive,” a scholarly editor might reassure you. But a name? That’s different. The title of this chapter is “Emoji Dick and the Eponymous Whale” because names are important, and one of the things I’d like to do is follow the name of this book into Melville’s novel.1 More than that, however, I’d simply like to offer a description of Emoji Dick because I think it is such a perverse and provocative object. More particularly, Emoji Dick offers a ludic contact zone between human intelligence and algorithmic processing, between text and image, as well as between literature and whatever the fate of the literary may be in an ever more digitally mediated and data-described world.

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To begin with, a few details: The cover of Emoji Dick alerts us that it was “edited and compiled by Fred Benenson” and “translated by Amazon Mechanical Turk.” Front matter includes an “About This Book” page [vii], which explains further that “each of the book’s approximately 10,000 sentences” was rendered into emoji “three times by a Amazon Mechanical Turk worker,” and then these “results” were “voted” upon by other Mechanical Turk workers “and the most popular version of each sentence” was selected and used in the book. We learn that in all “over eight hundred people spent approximately 3,795,980 seconds working to create this book” and that workers earned “five cents per translation and two cents per vote.” The money was raised on the crowd-funding platform, Kickstarter.com. (Benenson eventually worked at Kickstarter.) It took thirty days and contributions from eighty-three people to afford the crowd-sourced labor and to cover a small initial printing of the book through the on-demand, self-publication site Lulu.com. Though a good bit about the creation of Emoji Dick is not covered in this explanation, the confluence of “approximately 10,000 sentences,” “over eight hundred people,” and “approximately 3,795,980 seconds” points toward a book, a novel, an American classic, reimagined, managed, and executed as piecework. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—named after the eighteenth-century hoax, a chess playing “automaton” powered by a hidden person—coordinates a global workforce for US-based employers who request and remunerate batches of tiny, discrete jobs that Amazon calls Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). These tasks as a rule cannot be adequately or easily automated; like tagging images, transcribing lyrics, and decoding CAPTCHAs, they require human intelligence.2 While the nineteenth-century printers who originally produced Melville’s novel would also have imagined Moby-Dick as piecework, the labor in question would have been much different. Compositors would have set individual pieces of type—nineteenth-century compositors were typically paid per thousand ems set3—working from individual pages of manuscript copy. (Melville’s wife served as his copyist, we think, so the manuscript—now lost—would have been in Lizzie’s handwriting with her man Herman’s edits and corrections. No Bartlebies to see here.4) By contrast Benenson’s workers—familiarly “Turkers”—encountered the novel not as pages or units of typesetting but rather as individual sentences for so-called “translation” and “voting.” To avail himself of the Mechanical Turk platform, Benenson had to chop the novel into HITs, which meant pulling it apart into sentences. Readers of Emoji Dick encounter the novel that way too, because this “translation” is interlinear: each

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sentence of Melville’s text is preceded by its counterpart in emoji. Something of the logic of production thus remains legible within the pages of Emoji Dick, buttressed in Benenson’s acknowledgments by a long list of “all the individual Amazon Turk workers whose effort and clicks are the foundation of the project” (724). Turkers are always anonymous, so the list offers only platform-specific identifiers, like A106Q3N3OECN73 and A108WVBRT2DT4K. It is safe to say that no nineteenth-century novel acknowledges the individual printing house employees behind its production, even pseudonymously. So what we encounter in Emoji Dick is both a radically new, network-based phenomenon and a good reminder that books have always been the results of distributed labor, the nexus of multiple and unsung human and nonhuman agencies, all of the tasks done by workers and all of the work done by the material components and conditions of their labor. Students of literature rarely think in such crass, material terms. They tend to direct their attention to an ideal construct called the literary work, not the manufactured text through which that work is so generatively discerned, even as habits of reference (e.g., “Turn to page 63,”) and the demands of commerce natter at this high-mindedness. Still, there is a sense in which readers are used to thinking about books both as networked entities and in pieces. Google Books serves us snippets based upon our search terms and its giant digitized corpus, while earlier generations collected excerpts—by hand, one might say now—based upon individual reading experiences that were subjectively enabled by as well as enabling of a shared “bibliographical imagination” and sense of intertextual connectivity (see Piper 2009). Melville’s novel, case in point, opens with a brief preliminary section entitled “Etymology” (“Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School”) and a longer section entitled “Extracts” (“Supplied by a Sub-Sub Librarian”), both containing excerpts from earlier authors. How long and how widely Melville must have read in order to harvest—to read, select, and transcribe—his authorities on whales: Genesis, Jonah, Pliny, Plutarch, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Captain Cook, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, and so many more. Benenson’s edition omits the etymology and extracts; Emoji Dick gets right down to business with Chapter 1, sentence one, “Call me Ishmael.” Breaking the novel into sentences arrives at a scale that is simultaneously suitable for Turking and reminiscent of Texts and Tweets, the diminutive semantic habitats to which emoji most assuredly belong. Like the standard scholarly edition of Moby-Dick—the 1,043 pp. Northwestern-Newberry edition published in 1988—Benenson’s version

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did not involve any act of transcribing from earlier text. The NorthwesternNewberry editors wanted to use the first impression of the first American edition of Moby-Dick as their copytext—the core version they examined in relation to others—so instead of retyping the whole book—it’s a big one, after all—the copy they marked and sent to Northwestern University Press was a xerographic print made from a microfilm of Harvard University’s copy, identified as *AC85M4977.851ma(D) (Melville 1988, 764, n. 4). (Library books, like Turkers, go by alphanumeric code names.) Benenson likewise was not going to keyboard all of Moby-Dick sentence by sentence. A slightly garbled note on Emoji Dick’s copyright page explains that the version used is from Project Gutenberg, the by now venerable, public-spirited repository of eBooks. Project Gutenberg had its origins in 1971 and is committed to editions presented in ASCII, as .txt files. The project long eschewed textual markup strategies advocating in favor of plain vanilla literary content.5 The text used by Benenson, it may be gleaned, was produced in 2001 by combining one electronic text from a now-defunct project at Virginia Tech (happily preserved at the University of Adelaide) and another from Project Gutenberg’s own archives. It was proofread against a hardcopy, edition unspecified. An “Original Transcriber’s Note” indicates further, “In chapters 24, 89, and 90, we substituted a capital L for the symbol for the British pound, a unit of currency” (Melville 2008). This is because ASCII characters do not include the symbol for a British pound sterling. That Emoji Dick retains the capital L instead of a pound symbol is only the most trivial “tell” or indication that Benenson downloaded Project Gutenberg’s text file, wrote and ran a script to divide it into sentences and present them for Turkers to work on, who sent them back for assembly into a book.6 Following the ASCII version it incorporates, the text of Emoji Dick contains minimal formatting. So there are no centered and boxed cenotaphs in Chapter 7, and no Maltese cross for Queequeg’s signature in Chapter 18. But the plain vanilla look of ASCII has been replaced by painfully workaday Times New Roman. Genetic details like these matter. Parsing narratives of production not only serves to illuminate the book-as-nexus of agencies, it can act as a corrective to the cavalier ways in which popular discourse today distinguishes “print” from “digital” text in reference primarily and myopically to the mass market codex and the handheld screen. Neither print nor digital textuality is a simple or monolithic formation, and the complex textual conditions of the present moment, electronic and not, remain radically under-examined.7 Emoji Dick

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is the result of both close attention to detail and more distant algorithmic operations. It is a creative work of incremental decision-making and of data pours. (Shifts in scale exist everywhere: Melville’s first edition was painstakingly set in type and then—a different sort of pour—stereotyped for reprinting from plates.) Crowd-funded and crowd-sourced, Emoji Dick inhabits what Rita Raley calls a new “sociotechnical milieu” in which “we can no longer be certain about the distinction between a human-produced text and textual expressions that have been algorithmically mediated” (2016, 133). “The crowd” of fame is an aggregate of networked subjects tuned variously to the exploits and exploitations of dot.com capitalism. And here the crowd variously reworks the old-fashioned populism of Project Gutenberg into the slick neoliberal logic of Lulu.com, the former conceived in the interests of democratic access, the latter in terms of individual empowerment through self-publication. Digital from stem to stern, surely Emoji Dick deserves for all of this to be called an electronic book, even if I own it as a hefty codex? No, even eBooks today get International Standard Book Numbers or ISBNs, but a thorough inspection of Emoji Dick doesn’t turn up one of those. It’s a nonstandard bookobject; perhaps that’s the best that we can say for now. Laser-printed in full color, Emoji Dick costs $200. (It’s not much of a moneymaker: I figure that Kickstarter, Amazon, Lulu, Benenson, and the Turkers are all in the black, but very modestly so.8) My copy makes a weird cracking sound when I open it.

II If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whaleship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold. (Melville 1988, 110) One thing Emoji Dick most certainly is not—pace Benenson—is a translation, since emoji are pictorial not linguistic. Pictograms are not real writing; they lack the flexibility and range of written language.9 Scroll through the hundreds of emoji there are to choose from, and you might come up with some interesting observations about the differences between novels and text messages, the distinction of literary versus nonliterary discourse. (Apple divides them into People, Nature, Food & Drink, Celebration, Activity, Travel & Places, and Objects & Symbols.10) And you may consider as well the ways that writing on

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smartphones seems to veer away from the habitual conditions of inscription and thereby verge on more oral forms of communication. Beyond that, even the most casual browsing through the pages of Emoji Dick reveals the delightful absurdity of Benenson’s project. Occasional correspondences may be found between text and emoji, but randomness predominates, so much so that one wonders whether Benenson’s Turkers weren’t wantonly inattentive, generally non-Anglophone, or especially ingenious programmers able to automate selection of emoji without reference to Melville’s words. Even the correspondence of words “the whale” or “Moby Dick” to the spouting whale emoji is underdetermined and radically inconsistent, while—needless to say—the richness and density of Melville’s prose, the supreme breadth of his diction and abundance of verbiage cannot have a counterpart in images, even where judiciously selected. Take an extreme case, for instance, a fugue-like sentence at the beginning of Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale”: it runs for 467 words and is rendered as nine emoji, utterly nonsensical (253). Emoji Dick is a joke, a big one and timely. Emoji are in one sense an extension of emoticons and so build upon the increasingly capacious utility of punctuation marks and other nonphonetic operators—like the hashtag—we now think of as related to punctuation (see Scheible 2015). Theodor Adorno once compared punctuation marks to traffic signals, but he also knew that punctuation is where language most “resemble[s] music.” He was thinking of tempo, certainly, but also of tone (1990). Emoticons and now emoji greedily inhabit that tonal register, less as signals with semantic value (Stop! Go!) and more as phatic expressions of mere sociality (Hi! How are you!). Emoji were first developed by the Japanese telecom industry in 1999 and proved popular with customers, though each carrier had its own versions, so texting emoji to someone with a different service provider wasn’t a sure thing. (Mojibake—meaning character + transform—is the word used generally for unintelligible characters that are the result of transmission errors. The neologism emoji carries the sense of picture + writing + character.) The popular uptake of emoji, an emerging global smartphone market, and the multinational exertions of Google and Apple eventually created pressure for standardization, to the point that the Unicode Consortium agreed to support encoding standards for emoji in 2007.11 (More on Unicode below.) Apple added emoji to the iPhone in 2007, although the cartoon characters had to be unlocked with a Japanese app on North American phones until 2011. Popular attention in the West has surged of late, and emoji proliferate in text messages and across social media

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platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Knock-off “stickers” populate Facebook and other social networks. As one journalist declared in a New York Magazine cover story, “They are a small invasive cartoon army of faces and vehicles and flags and food and symbols trying to topple the millennia-long reign of words” (Sternberg 2014, 32). The magazine called on Fred Benenson, incidentally, to turn those words into emoji: mobile phone with input arrow, cartoon family, VS, pen, hourglass, old person, notebook. Battle is joined by a billion tapping thumbs, but the war between words and images has been long already. The whole history of culture, W. J. T. Mitchell notes, “is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs” (1986, 43). We glimpse this struggle in ancient prohibitions against graven images as well as in modernity amid successive spasms of anxiety around the supposed seductions of chromos, cinema, comic books, television, and video games. We glimpse it too in centuries of mischaracterizations by Westerners about the nature of East Asian scripts (see DeFrancis 1989). Melville and the Romantics before him were steeped in the same struggle, Symbolism (with a capital S) and sublimity in a sense forged partly from its dialectic. And what for centuries has been waged as a struggle rich in moral, aesthetic, and psychodynamic presumptions has also been reducible to questions of technological affordance. That is, there are contexts in which technological capabilities help to determine what counts as text and what counts as image. The distinction between linguistic and pictorial signs persists, thanks in good measure to the different technical means—the media—by which words and images have been reproducible and transmissible. If Melville had needed any illustrations—he couldn’t afford them—his publishers would have had them made separately from the typeset pages and by differently specialized means. Today text and image are distinct from one another computationally, since images have generally not been process-able, except with recourse to text. Search Flickr or other image databases, if you like, but what you are really searching are hidden linguistic tags: text not image. As Matt Kirschenbaum once put it, “Images remain largely opaque to the algorithmic eyes of the machine” (2003: 138). Even scanned texts, if they haven’t been properly OCRed, are frustratingly too much like images. (Returning to ye olde print shop, you might say that a scanned text that hasn’t been properly OCRed is too much like a stereotype plate and not enough like pages standing in type.) Admittedly I am overstating this last point. We know that there are certain computational realms in which images are process-able, fully encoded. Some

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are brand new. Google Photo can now sort your pictures for you, if you’ll let it, and we know too that the security state has been driving developments in fingerprint, facial, and other forms of biometric recognition. Image search is finally a reality in some contexts, and image analysis, like translation, is a hot area for the application of machine learning techniques. Zillions of tags added by humans, including a goodly number of Amazon Mechanical Turkers, are “teaching” machine learning algorithms to “see” image features, effectively opening the algorithmic “eye” of the machine to image data. This is momentous. In some realms, however, the computational availability of images is old hat. Think of CAD (computer-assisted design) or, better, think of OCR (optical character recognition). OCR depends upon a hardware-software combination that processes shapes into linguistic components. The development and use of OCR, if you will, teaches us what we already know: writing as writing depends upon visual units of semantic value. Alphabets and nonalphabetic scripts are essentially and by definition both pictorial and linguistic; they are “verbal imagery” in the first instance and of the finest grain (Mitchell 1986, 27). Thus emoji flourish as a cartoon army storming the citadel of words, but they also hail from a register in which the distinction between pictorial and linguistic signs isn’t tenable or sufficient. Emoji aren’t true writing, but they are handled as if they were. They are picked out individually on tiny keyboards, and they are digitally encoded as characters, like the letters I typed here. Each has a name, each has a code point corresponding to a bit value, and each has an abstract shape, a range within which variations remain intelligibly “the same.” (Characters, something like literary works or Platonic forms, are ideal constructs.) Just as “the same” letter can be represented in many different ways—by any number of specific glyphs of various styles and sizes (fonts)—so the same emoji can also appear differently, less for aesthetic reasons in this case than for proprietary ones. “In the parlance of the gaming industry,” emoji are “skinned” (Stark and Crawford 2015, 5). Corporations like Apple have their own rendering of each character. Their underlying coherence, their broad transmissibility, is based upon their description within the evolving Unicode standard, an international standard whereby all written characters in all written languages get individually and uniquely encoded into sequences of ones and zeros for interchange and representation by different operating systems, platforms, and applications. Unicode, as its name implies, is a unification, conceived originally as a way to move beyond the parochial limitations of local standards like ASCII, which was

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great for English but not for other written languages. Unicode was dreamed as a 16-bit standard (ASCII is 7-bit), and back in 1988 that called for what one advocate called “перестро́йка (perestroika), i.e., restructuring our old ways of thinking,” which included special attention to the “unification” of East Asian scripts. Unicode began partly by defining an underlying, unified character set for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which reduced some 130,000 characters to 27,786 (see Graham 2000). Emoji Dick, I’m suggesting, speaks both from and to an extended contemporary moment in which the image/text distinction exists under pressure, in which writing newly encroaches on oral-communication norms, even as the meanings (the uses) of punctuation continue to puddle out, and in which global code space is finally—or at least increasingly—a reality: one encoding standard, all writing systems. For all of this, Emoji Dick is also born of an extended legacy of contact between East and West. A novel reimagined as piecework, the literary dialed down to the smartphone, Emoji Dick asks us to consider the legacy of East/West contact as much in terms of signal and noise—in terms of media— as in terms of cultural exchange, international trade, or what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called worldwide “intercourse” (Verkehr) (see Arac 2007). Tom Mullaney’s ongoing history of telegraphs, typewriters, and typesetting and typecasting systems in East Asia has a bearing here, as do today’s culturally specific patterns of use: cell phones adopted in Japan as a medium for literary fiction, for example, and facsimile machines retained in Tokyo homes and offices long after their disappearance in the West.12 Against this kind of media history Emoji Dick is a riff of sorts, calling our attention to mis- and noncommunication as well as to workarounds, improvisation, and accommodation. Appearing just as the academy in the West theorizes something called “world literature,” Emoji Dick fakes the export—the translation—of Melville’s novel as it simultaneously evokes a succession of recent imports—Pokémon, Hello Kitty, now emoji—that hail from Japan’s culture industry of cute and that have arrived in the West on the heels of more consequential and less blatantly affective expressions of late capitalism, such as the Toyota Production System (TPS). Critical successor to Fordism, TPS is a management philosophy and manufacturing system that has reengineered mass production as “lean” production, restructuring the increasingly automated shop floor for team-driven efficiencies and integrating logistics for just-in-time manufacture. If Emoji Dick depends upon recent innovations in knowledge work/Turk, it can also be read against a global history of labor more generally.

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In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels imagined world literature as a tailwind behind globalized means of production: “As in material, so also in intellectual production,” they put it. “From the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.” Today world literature is a disciplinary formation mapped selectively to college curricula. It has recently been described as a “mode of circulation and of reading .  .  . available for reading established classics and new discoveries alike” (Damrosch 2003, 5), a description which—it must be admitted—works splendidly for literature in general, forget the “world.” Whether one is for or “against” world literature (because of its “translatability assumption”), the formulation at least helps to conceive a global system of literary production and consumption that is predicated on the flow of cultural and other forms of capital (Apter 2013, 3). It even “becomes possible,” Pascale Casanova writes, “to measure the literariness (the power, prestige, and volume of linguistic and literary capital) of a language, not in terms of the number of writers and readers it has, but in terms of the number of cosmopolitan intermediaries—publishers, editors, critics, and especially translators—who assure the circulation of texts into the language or out of it” (2004, 21). Likewise we might measure the relative scientific-ness of different languages, judging from a recent and fascinating book by historian Michael Gordin (2015). Science, at least, is international in the way that Marx and Engels imagined—scientific knowledge is knowledge everywhere, no matter its nation of origin—and science is more assumedly translatable than literature. Yet scientific publishing too has from its origins been intricately structured by linguistic politics. No surprise: different discourses—literature and science—function differently along the trajectory (which Marx and Engels did not imagine) toward global English. Put another way, if global English is itself an elite discourse of contemporary capital, its co-option or infection of existing discourses remains uneven and heteromorphic.13

III I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans. (Melville 1988, 136) My students recently observed that half the fun of Emoji Dick is saying it. (They like the word dick, yes, but there is pleasure in the whole title.) The word emoji, like

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the word perestroika is an untranslatable. It functions as a checkpoint, marking a historically specific zone of contact and of paradoxical incommensurability and pleasurable accommodation between languages (see Apter 2013: chs. 1–2). And just as perestroika is a Roman-ized untranslatable that we can date to the Gorbachev era of the 1980s, emoji is a transliterated untranslatable evolved in and of our networked present. Inhabiting Melville’s title with its partial rhyme on “Moby,” the word emoji evokes the problem of naming that the spouting whale icon amplifies. Crucially, Emoji Dick retitles Melville’s novel without renaming its white whale. Eponymy short-circuited, Emoji Dick tries to refuse the identity of whales and books upon which Melville’s big novel seems premised. The premise is nowhere clearer than in Chapter 32, “Cetology,” in which Melville’s narrator tries to offer a systematic account of the varieties of whales. He does this bibliographically, by dividing them into formats: folio whales, octavo whales, and duodecimo whales. To the extent that Emoji Dick plays with Melville’s identification of whales and books—of Moby-Dick the novel and Moby Dick the character—it is only on the most slender grounds: Emoji Dick is a big white codex, and it’s unreadable. If half the fun of Emoji Dick is indeed saying it, then the other half is not reading it. For the record, Moby-Dick itself is famously unreadable, larded with one long excursus after another on subjects relating to whales and whaling. As a result, American popular culture has turned Moby-Dick into a punch line forever waiting for its next joke. One example: Woody Allen’s Zelig, eponymous antihero of the 1983 mockumentary about a human chameleon, begins his identity-blending career by pretending to have read Moby-Dick among a group

I.

THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE. As the type of the FOLIO I present the SPERM WHALE; of the OCTAVO, the GRAMPUS; of the DUODECIMO, the PORPOISE.

Figure 11.1 Excerpt from Emoji Dick by Herman Melville, edited and compiled by Fred Benenson, translated by Amazon Mechanical Turk (Lulu Press, 2010), p. 180.

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of people discussing it at a cocktail party. Students of literature do read MobyDick, of course, and I commend it to your attention. Not reading Moby-Dick is a shame. Not reading Emoji Dick is the point. As such, Emoji Dick directs our attention to varieties of not reading that today beset and describe the literary field. There is the not reading done by the present generation of college students in the United States, who—at least anecdotally—are everywhere deserting the traditional literature majors for what they have been led to believe are more practical fields. But there are a couple of other species of not reading that warrant attention too. I refer on the one hand to the not reading of the literary-critical methodology called “distant reading,” and on the other hand to the not reading to which a variety of contemporary literary expressions differently seem to aspire. So-called distant reading uses computational methods to “mine” (i.e., to analyze) vast textual corpora with the preliminary rationale of getting beyond the relatively tiny number of literary works, the “canonical fraction,” which any of us can hope to read in the course of a lifetime (Moretti 2000: 55). Contemporary literary expressions, meanwhile, play with not reading in at least two ways. First, there are screen-based interventions that variously refuse reading; this is where net art addresses the book arts, you might say. Then there are the exertions of conceptual or “uncreative” writers such as Simon Morris and Kenneth Goldsmith. Goldsmith’s transcription of a single day’s issue of the New York Times, for example—published as a massive blue codex entitled Day (2003)— compares to Benenson’s book in its scale, certainly, making another big book out of an ephemeral non-codex form. Benenson’s book is built on Texts and Tweets, that is, the way the Goldsmith’s is built on the newsprint in his recycling pile. But Goldsmith transcribed his text laboriously by hand, so he has always said, which marks a difference from Benenson as from another recent version of Moby-Dick rendered as a blog: “The Time I Spent on a Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective on the World” was posted by “Ishmael, Sailor” on the humor site Clickhole.com in August 2014. (Hint: it uses a capital L for the British pound sterling.) Not reading is a category even more capacious than reading, and it cannot be my business here to taxonomize its extent or explore its long history. (I think immediately of Pierre Bayard’s waggish How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, and Craig Dworkin’s recent analysis of artworks that consist of books with entirely blank pages, Bayard 2009; Dworkin 2013.) Of particular

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interest might be how the not reading of today compares to earlier forms, as well as how not reading variously entails and delimits reading itself, mobilizing a host of changing assumptions about readers and the conditions of readership. Emoji Dick, like so much of today’s not reading, responds to and emerges from the contemporary logic of computation, with its structured hierarchies and transmission protocols. And it turns out that Americans have been worrying the fate of reading in an age of computers since at least 1955, when the University of Chicago Library School convened a future-of-the-book conference under the shadow of cybernetics (Asheim 1955). If Emoji Dick is a conversation piece (I can’t quite call it an object lesson), it’s a conversation piece well suited to a conversation we’ve all been party to for some time. And Emoji Dick helps beg the question of how literature—itself a culturally and historically specific “mode of circulation and of reading”—may be faring under like conditions. The literary is a principle of thrift, a classification of discourse, which emerged and evolved amid the proliferation of printed meanings.14 What will its futures be amid the proliferation of digital meanings? It’s hard to say. Finally, maybe eponymy is key after all. Benenson retitled Melville’s book without renaming his whale, but the title Emoji Dick refers of course to characters, more than eight hundred of them, which populate this version of the novel and play such a starring role. Characters: it’s a bad pun that works— if at all—by displacement, bumping attention away from the fictional agencies of the novel—whale, narrator, Ahab, Queequeg, Starbuck, etc.—and toward the conditions of its textual production and reproduction, character by character. These conditions, as I’ve been at pains to suggest above, may be described on the one hand in exacting, even bibliographical detail and on the other hand with reference to the broadest of contexts. To the extent it is somehow about emoji as characters, Emoji Dick sidetracks linguistic communication in general and literariness in particular by invoking pictograms as not writing that cannot be read. What emoji communicate remains pretty fuzzy: warm and fuzzy. As one recent account explains, “The meaning of individual emoji is relatively plastic” (Stark and Crawford 2015, 5). Rare are the communications—within Emoji Dick or abroad in the world—in which emoji have practical utility as symbols. Instead, emoji hold the channel open as signifiers of “affect, emotion, or sociality” (ibid.), marking the existence of senders and recipients as characters within a shared exchange. Emoji Dick opens the line, not so we can hear from Herman Melville, but so we can feel good knowing that he’s still there.

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Notes 1 In literary criticism, the term eponymous describes a character whose name also serves as title: Moby Dick the whale, and Moby-Dick the novel. The title of the first British edition of Moby-Dick was simply The Whale; it is ultimately less useful and less important than the American edition of the same year because its publisher cleaned up some of Melville’s radical skepticism. 2 Decoding CAPTCHAs is an illegitimate use of Mechanical Turk, but there are apparently “CAPTCHA farms” that consist of similar piecework platforms. 3 An em is a measure of type that varies according to the size of the typeface being set. 4 See Melville (1988, 622). Doesn’t this familial detail change your reading of “Bartleby” a little? 5 ASCII is an American encoding standard for representing text. Originally based on telegraph codes it has a very limited range (as a 7-bit standard, basic ASCII could only represent 27 or 128 different characters). Project Gutenberg’s commitment to ASCII caused swivets of consternation among scholarly editors who patiently explained the disadvantages of ASCII and the misperceptions of its advocates. See Sperberg-McQueen (1991). 6 The work involved was nontrivial, and I’m grateful for a personal conversation with Benenson in July 2015, when he shared the many details—failures and successes— of production. 7 But see Hayles and Pressman (2013), especially opening chapters by Rita Raley and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. See also Galey (2012). 8 Kickstarter, Amazon, and Lulu each have different fee schedules, of course. To give an idea about the Turkers, 10,000 sentences @ 3 translations @ 5 cents = $1,500. Benenson told me that he’s been making about $100 a month lately from Emoji Dick. 9 See DeFrancis (1989); also John Hudson quoted in Hassett (2015). 10 Emoji ordering is arbitrary, and different vendors offer different categorizations. These are the categories on my iPhone, which as of today (July 5, 2015) is using Unicode 7.0 versions, not the newly released Unicode 8.0. See also http://www. unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-ordering.html accessed July 2015. My iPhone upgraded to Unicode 8.0 on July 7. 11 See Schwartzberg (2014) for a description of Google’s role. 12 Thomas Mullaney’s global history of the Chinese typewriter is forthcoming from the MIT press. On cell phone novels, see Onishi (2008). On facsimile machines, see Fackler (2013). See also Gottlieb (2009, 65–78) and Mizumura (2015). 13 Correspondence with Christine Mitchell was helpful in making this point, and I’m grateful for her careful reading of an earlier draft and her suggestions. 14 Here I’m echoing the phrasing of Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” and inspired by Guillory (1993) and Wellmon (2015).

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Works cited Adorno, Theodor A., 1990. “Punctuation Marks.” Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. The Antioch Review 48 (3): 300–05. Apter, Emily, 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso. Arac, Jonathan, 2007. “Global and Babel: Language and Planet.” In Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. Edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, 19–38. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Asheim, Lester, ed. 1955. The Future of the Book: Implications of the Newer Developments in Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bayard, Pierre, 2009. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Bloomsbury. Casanova, Pascale, 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ClickHole, 2014. “The Time I Spent on a Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective on the World” August 14. http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/timei-spent-commercial-whaling-ship-totally-chang-768 Damrosch, David, 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. DeFrancis, John, 1989. Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Dworkin, Craig, 2013. No Medium. Cambridge: MIT Press. Fackler, Martin, 2013. “In High-Tech Japan, the Fax Machine Rolls On.” New York Times, February 13. https://nyti.ms/2nCkCje Galey, Alan, 2012. “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographic Imagination.” Book History 15: 210–47. doi:10.1353/bh.2012.0008 Gordin, Michael D., 2015. Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English. Chicago: University of Chicago. Gottlieb, Nanette, 2009. “Language on the Internet in Japan.” In Internationalizing Internet Studies: Beyond Anglophone Paradigms. Edited by Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland, 65–78. New York: Routledge. Graham, Tony, 2000. Unicode: A Primer. Foster City, CA: M&T Books. Guillory, John, 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hassett, Shannon, 2015. “The Near and Far Future of Emoji.” Hopes and Fears. http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/future/technology/168949-the-future-ofemoji. Hayles, N. Katherine and Pressman, Jessica, eds. 2013. Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., 2003. “The Word as Image in an Age of Digital Reproduction.” In Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media. Edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick, 137–56. Cambridge: MIT Press. Melville, Herman, 1988. Moby-Dick or The Whale. Vol. 6 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library. Melville, Herman, 2008. Moby-Dick; or The Whale. Produced by Jonesey Daniel Lazarus and David Widger. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-0.txt Melville, Herman, 2010. Emoji Dick; or The Whale. Edited and compiled by Fred Benenson. Translation by Amazon Mechanical Turk. Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press. Mitchell, W. J. T., 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mizumura, Minae, 2015. The Fall of Language in the Age of English. Translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter. New York: Columbia University Press. Moretti, Franco, 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1: 55–68. Onishi, Norimitsu, 2008. “Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular.” New York Times, 20 January. https://nyti.ms/2x0xSFN Piper, Andrew, 2009. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Raley, Rita, 2016. “Algorithmic Translations.” CR: The Centennial Review 16 (1): 115–37. Scheible, Jeff, 2015. Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schwartzberg, Lauren, 2014. “The Oral History of the Poop Emoji (Or, How Google Brought Poop to America).” Fast Company, November 18. http://www.fastcompany. com/3037803/the-oral-history-of-the-poop-emoji-or-how-google-brought-poop-toamerica Sperberg-McQueen, C. M., 1991. “Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 6 (1): 34–46. doi:10.1093/llc/6.1.34 Stark, Luke and Crawford, Kate, 2015. “The Conservatism of Emoji: Work, Affect, and Communication in Informational Capitalism.” Social Media + Society 1 (2): 1–11. doi:10.1177/2056305115604853. Sternbergh, Adam, 2014. “Smile, You’re Speaking Emoji.” New York Magazine, November 17–23: 30–35+. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/11/emojisrapid-evolution.html Wellmon, Chad, 2015. Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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The Demediation of Writing in Memory Palace and Fugitive Sparrows1 Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

In this chapter, I focus on a pressing issue in humanities research: the question of alphabetic writing in the digital age. As the first medium technology, the origins of alphabetic writing are still unclear. Was Pharaonic Egyptian writing the most important source of graphic inspiration for the earliest alphabetic scripts or are there other sources (Haring 2015)? How did some of these scripts survive and develop, while others did not, and how did they feed into the alphabetic scripts we know today? How, moreover, did an alphabetic consciousness evolve over time—or can one even assume something like an alphabet consciousness? These are questions relevant not only to archaeologists, but also to philosophers of consciousness interested in the cognitive implications of literacy (Olson 2016), to media theorists researching the complex relations between media technologies and cultural change—and to comparative literary scholars focused on the historicity and materiality of literary writing. Surprisingly, until now, literary historians and literary critics have given the matter and history of alphabetic writing little thought, even if the complex dynamic between speech and writing has been hotly debated since Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967). In this chapter I take the media philosopher Vilém Flusser, and his ideas on the future of writing, as a starting point to unravel the new directions that novelists and graphic designers have taken with alphabetic writing as a figure—to use McLuhan’s metaphor from Gestalt psychology—against the new ground of digital code (McLuhan 1964; Flusser 1987). I investigate alphabetic writing as an object, rather than a vehicle, and ask the question if this objectification or demediation (Stewart) of alphabetic script indicates—as Flusser surmised in the 1980s—a transition into a universe of technical images: code-generated images that would embody post-historical structures as they consist of assembled

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particles (Flusser 1985, 2011b). My overarching question is how the perceived demediation of alphabetic script in literary or literary-like works informs and adds to recent findings in the study of bookishness (Pressman 2009) and media archaeology. Before starting my discussion it must be emphasized that since the nineteenth century, discussions on the origins of alphabetic script have been culturally charged. Findings in the development of alphabetic script have been appropriated by some earlier scholars to argue for a unique European identity (see Naveh 1982), while others have claimed the consistent vowel marking in Greek alphabet as the beginning of a new way of (Platonic) thinking that may even have been foundational for Western culture (Havelock 1963). Writing, we have known since Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Jack Goody, and Walter Ong (but also since the more critical receptions of Ong and Marshall McLuhan),2 has helped to shape our cultures, our thinking, and perhaps even our capacity for critical thinking.3 Understanding how we express ourselves, and have done so in the past, is crucial to understanding our present, and projecting our future. As we have lived in the zones of alphabetic scripts for three millennia, we do not easily recognize that alphabetic writing as we know it today, and its cultural significance, may not always remain the same. Most popular histories of writing tend to project the past of writing as inevitably flowing toward an unchanging present: the fulfillment of the alphabetic world. However, the history of writing is itself a history of constant mutation (cf. Gnanadesikan 2009; Houston 2004). The future and the past of alphabetic writing cannot, therefore, be given. Indeed, I argue here that literature today may be the “writing on the wall” indicating that we may be moving from a “graphic” into what Catherine Malabou calls a “plastic” age: an age of plasticity that connotes both the synthetic and the mutable. Using Hari Kunzru’s novella Memory Palace (2013) and Zachary Sifuentes’s graphic work Fugitive Sparrows (2008), I show how literary writing envisions writing’s possible futures.

The end of writing and the end of times Let me start, then, with some literary writing: I have been charged with membership of an internet. There has been no trial, just a meeting of thanes in the Great Hall of the London thing. Though they

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used these words—charged, internet—they don’t really know what they mean anymore. They are words from before the Withering. . . . The men who gathered to question me have no more notion of information-age Laws than they do of physics, or evilution. . . . They are the bringers of the Wilding, the ones who will make the world anew. (Kunzru 2013, 12)

Hari Kunzru’s Memory Palace evokes a world without traces. Set in a distant future, this is a post-information world.4 Nothing is left after a magnetic storm has destroyed all cyber networks, all channels of communication, and almost all knowledge and memories stored in these networks and channels (a phase known as the Withering). Words from a lost world—charged, internet, hospital—drift meaninglessly in a life sphere dictated by ecofascists and reality fundamentalists who are known as The Thing. Ecofascists: everybody back to earth, to the Now, beyond the structure of time, the human, and history. Reality fundamentalists: back to the Thing in itself, beyond words and writing. Only simple language is allowed. Even the slightest trace of words pronounced cannot remain drifting, dangling in the air. This phase is known as the Wilding: back to physical reality. The anonymous first-person narrator tells what will be his last story in this world without traces. After many adventures, he became a member of a secret society that tries to preserve knowledge from a lost world. It is forbidden to inscribe this knowledge. Yet the society tries to preserve information through ancient mnemonic techniques: Here is how to remember. First you must choose a place. It should be somewhere you know very well. Most people pick somewhere spacious and grand—a great hall, one of the ruined towers of the city. You get to know this place as well as you can. You walk around it, impressing every detail on your memory, until you can tour it in your mind when you are not there. Then you place the things you need to remember around the building, in the form of pictures. These pictures must be startling enough to trigger your imagination . . . when you need to recall something, you merely go in your imagination. (Kunzru 2013, 9)

Kunzru’s novella, we will see, materially performs this imaginative feast: it changes the genre of the novella into a collection of startling pictures that you can walk around. For now, let me remark that this art of memory does not always work out well. For Memory Palace illustrates the dynamics of memory—it revolves around acts of memory and how such acts transform the past, or even: create the past through the present. Thus, yes, the laws of Newton are preserved through the multisensory and shifting modes of oral communication, but also:

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the laws of relativity of “milord” and “lady” Ayn Stein, Darwing. All that is remembered in the post-information world mutates into something different: names are remembered erroneously, just as knowledge is passed on imperfectly. It is striking to see how Memory Palace thus imagines a world that Harold Innis, Ong, Havelock, and McLuhan speculated on in the mid- and later twentieth century: a preliterate world. Innis already indicated in 1947 the impossibility of imagining such a world from the vantage point of the present: “The oral tradition emphasized memory and training. We have no history of conversation or of the oral tradition except as they are revealed darkly through the written or printed word” (Innis 1991, 9). We are caught in the paradigm of writing and the dominant modes of knowledge writing has brought about. In Kunzru’s novella, the violence of the magnetic storm that wipes away the world of writing—in a wider sense: the trace—only attests to its long-lasting cultural dominance . . . An aura was seen all over the world, great waves of light shivering in the sky. They saw the great waves of light, and their screens spewed out their last sign and went dark. After that, all memory was gone, and the market was empty . . . It is said that the people had lived in the realm of the sign so long that no one could remember how to get food, and without pewter they no longer knew their own names. (2013, 42)

This is Baudrillard: the realm of the sign that has closed in on itself, and multiplied itself ad infinitum. Using the novella for the laboratory of human experience, Kunzru offers us a version of “preliterate” society as we can only imagine it after and according to the realm of the sign. Yet he imagines this society more in the tradition of Innis than of Ong: Innis, as Jonathan Sterne has stressed, was always at pains to show that in oral intercourse “the eye, ear, and brain, the senses and faculties acted together in busy co-operation and rivalry, each eliciting, stimulating, and supplementing the other” (Innis qtd. in Sterne 2011, 210). Kunzru, in close cooperation with Laurie Britton Newell and Ligaya Salazar, who curated this novella, interprets and mimics oral intercourse in precisely this multimodal way. Collaborating with twenty illustrators and graphic designers, Kunzru offers a mode of storytelling that is medially undecided: every different passage has a different “illustration,” made from a different viewpoint on the novella. What is more, these illustrations were displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in the summer of 2013. The book became an exhibition, or more precisely, the novella became an installation with images to walk around and return to.

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As Newell and Salazar point out, unlike “reading a book, visiting an exhibition is not usually a linear experience” (2013, 85). Kunzru was commissioned to write the novella for the exhibition on the basis of his previous work that played “explicitly with sequence” (ibid.). Memory Palace, too, tends toward the fragmentary, rather than the linear mode of the novel that has become its dominant format: it is a collection of disparate memories. This tendency away from the linear at once performs the oral world that Kunzru conjures up: oral intercourse is not necessarily about linearity, about putting things in line. Oral communication, or how we now imagine it to be, may have a more circular and associative nature. As Flusser speculates, oral discourse “didn’t have a direction . . . it ran into obstacles (refutations), went backward, turned itself in a circle” (2011a, 32). Its logic, according to many scholars on orality and early literacy, is additive (associative) so that oral discourses may create the impression of being stitched together out of fragments. Distraction and digressions are therefore familiar elements of oral discourse. Indeed, the way in which Kunzru has his narrator retrieve knowledge from the world before the magnetization, in lists, recalls the paratactic connections of orality. We encounter such connections as a “residual orality,” for instance, in the commedia dell’arte.5 The logic of association also defines the relation between the written passages and the illustrations in Memory Palace: the latter do not serve the former but rather mark out a new territory. The plurality of the illustrations, each by a different hand, together forming a catalogue, reinforces the fragmentary nature of the tale and its telling. Thus, the different visual styles and interpretations underline a centrifugal movement—a destructive movement that is, of course, just as present in Kunzru’s world of Wilding. Seen in this way, Memory Palace requires the kind of reading that graphic novels and comic books do: it requires multitasking, as we scan many different patterns at the same time. Here, the images do not simply support the story, they rather distract as they create so many different impressions of the story world. Often, the images take over, as on pp. 51–53, when Némo Tral’s evocation of the Campers (outside of the city, where the narrator grew up), the Shard, and the Limpicks (a London suburb) becomes a puzzling and tantalizing sequence in itself. The cluster of ancient palaces of the Campers mentioned in the text (p. 50) only bears a faint relation to Tral’s plastic configuration of it. His images convey darkness, rain, storm: a visual story in itself in five frames. That visual impression in turn triggers yet more stories, yet more narrative potentialities triggered in the reader’s imagination. In this way, the images in Memory Palace

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present spaces of digression. Their relation to the text is defined by juxtaposition. What matters is the in between of image and text, the one upsetting, confusing, overtaking the other. In this way, a different kind of writing can emerge: a dialogic writing, negotiating between words and images, that emerges out of a coproduction between author, curators, and illustrators. As such a coproduction, Memory Palace continues the fashion inaugurated in affordable print (but introduced long before in medieval manuscripts) in the 1960s with what Jeffrey Schnapp (2012) has called the electronic information age book: Jerome Agel’s verbal-visual books that typically involved a producer, an author, and a designer. Quentin Fiore’s and Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage (1967) is no doubt the most famous among them: a book predicated on the advertising industry. With the project that resulted in Memory Palace, Newell and Salazar had wanted to explore the potentialities of the book in an age “in which reading formats are rapidly changing, and print—as book, newspaper or magazine—is rapidly losing its dominance” (Newell and Salazar 2012, 84). When is something still a book? When can we still be said to be reading? Do we need to read in a line, or in fragments (as we have done before)? How can an exhibition become a novella and vice versa? Mikhail Bakhtin once wrote that the novel is “plasticity itself ” (1981, 39) because it never fixes itself—its framework is not (yet) hardened. This, then, is why a novella can assume the nonlinear aspect of an exhibition: why it can accommodate and reflect new modes of perception, in its “living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)” (ibid., 7)—because as a genre it is younger than the book. By its nature, the novel/novella belongs to the experimental. What does this genre show us today, in a digital age that has been said to witness the death of the novel? Could it be that Kunzru’s novel, by its very plasticity, shows us a transition that is taking place from what Catherine Malabou (2009) has called the graphic to the plastic—from the Derridean trace to a dynamic of mutability and metamorphosis? Is our age not so much witnessing the end of the novel as a constant transformation of the role of writing, and its relation to images, in our culture? I would like to answer this question by moving from the novella to poetry, yet remain with the fragment and the imaginary. I would like to turn to a work where writing itself has been transformed into an image— nearly illegible, yet readable, I will show, in a different, perhaps more effective way. We can mix words with images innovatively, but how can we make writing visible as such?

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Making writing appear as such In modern Western culture, literature—literally: quantities of letters—is an art of writing. We know very well, and we have just seen, that literature is also—and is now increasingly becoming again—an art and practice of orality and visuality. Yet as a cultural institution literature is (still) a function of writing, and studied as such. The connection between writing and temporality—between writing and a linear code that is unrelentingly progressive, unrepeatable—is conceptually still very strong. This linear code has been programmed into our writing machines such as the computer, the typewriter, the telegraph, or the printing press. Automation has sped up the progressive tense of writing, as machines can write much more effectively than we do. Flusser already noticed this in the 1980s: “It is enough to observe the breathless speed with which videotexts appear on terminals” (2011a, 21) or, for that matter, subtitling. For us today, it is enough to observe electronic text works of the last decades, such as those made by Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries in flash, or Jim Andrews and his rapidly mutating Stir-Fry Texts.6 Writing here has become an object within an image, a surface— barely legible, racing past, too quickly for us to read. We know from Flusser and his ideas on the future of alphabetic writing that such pixilation presents the fatal transition: into the universe of technical images we go, leaving writing to the machine as algorithm. So, it may be that analog writing is about to be morphed—the writing that we have known so far and for so long. In his Ethics of Writing, the philosopher Carlo Sini remarks that precisely in such an epoch as ours, writing “shows itself as something ‘finite’ . . . ‘historical’, ‘contingent’” (Sini 2009, 39).7 We no longer live in the house of writing, we are somehow beginning to distance ourselves from it. This is when alphabetic writing becomes visible as such. How could such writing work? This is what literary writing, as a novel writing, explores, or can and perhaps should explore, even if such writing may never really take place, now or in the future. What matters for literary writing is the exploration of potentialities of writing. How, for instance, does a graphic designer create a reading experience without creating a text? How does that affect writing and our idea of writing and reading? Just as the memory devices that Kunzru invokes in Memory Palace relate back to the most ancient and primitive of writing techniques, so graphic presentations of ideas and events are now known as aspects of “embryo writing” (cf. Avrin 1991, 19). Present-day experiments with such embryo writing abound, both in screenic and paper-

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based zones. What is “novel” about these experiments, in Bakhtin’s sense of the word? In Fugitive Sparrows (2008) Zachary Sifuentes has rewritten by hand all of Emily Dickinson’s poetry into an abstract painting. Sifuentes has written out Dickinson’s poems as a transformative writing: a writing that becomes purely graphic. Fugitive Sparrows is a drawing that measures 90 by 45 inches and that offers all 160,000 words of Dickinson’s poems at once on a canvas, in the shape of sparrows, drawn in illegible writing. We know that Dickinson’s work, especially her later work, handwritten on envelopes, already opened up poetry to a space beyond the confines of the book. Spatial arrangement and eccentric word design were crucial aspects of her poetics. Sifuentes externalizes and expands the visuality of Dickinson’s poetry—and in so doing renders her work illegible as verbal work. Her poems are integrated into a multimedial plane that invites you to look at the word-drawing and listen to Dickinson’s poetry at once. Rewriting Dickinson, Sifuentes’s drawing is also an erasure: Dickinson’s words have become the building blocks of a near-illegible surface. He has turned her into art, and made writing turn itself away from us. One of the peculiarities of alphabetic writing, Carlo Sini observes, is that it is in a sense invisible, and it can only work as such an invisible vehicle: “One does not look at it, one must not contemplate it. Rather, one must overcome it. One sees through it. . . . In reading, the look does not aim at a seeing, but rather at a meaning and a meant” (Sini 2009,  71). Fugitive Sparrows interrogates writing as a window onto the invisible, but it is part of the logic of plasticity that this interrogation indicates new potentialities of writing as overwriting. This new potentiality is what I would like to call visual archiving. Fugitive Sparrows allows us to read without reading: it allows us to see how Sifuentes has read Dickinson’s poetry— we “read” his reading of her; the drawing is a record of reading her. On his website, Sifuentes puts it as follows: “A poem’s language can be represented to apprehend graphically how the poem functions linguistically: its rhythms and rhymes, its images and metaphors, and its tangential and ulterior reasoning.” A graphic rendering of a poem’s linguistic functioning: how it works. The drawing presents and preserves—archives—a way to navigate Dickinson’s work. As such, indeed, the drawing is a means of preservation, as much as, say, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes archives (by cutting out) Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles.8 Fanning out into a network of lines and visual intersections, what Sifuentes’s drawing foregrounds is the force of exscription at work within Emily Dickinson’s poetry. I use Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of exscription in the sense of expressive

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richness: certain texts trigger the imagination so vividly that they become a living memory in the mind of the reader. Inscribing meaning into a text, an entire network of relations is exscribed, beyond a designated meaning. What is thus at stake in exscription is “the infinite retreat of meaning . . . what instigates all possible meaning.” This is the power of suggestion, association. A little later, Nancy speaks of an “infinite discharge of meaning” when he explains the accidental logic of exscription: “In inscribing significations we exscribe the presence of what withdraws from all signification” (Nancy 1993, 339)—what comes to mind that had not been specified. The freedom of “being in exscription” is thus the freedom of writing having “unburden[ed] itself, emptie[d] itself of itself ” (ibid.). Tellingly, Nancy contrasts this “being in exscription” to linear thinking (“the movement of a man who walks straight ahead”) and links it to the writings of the ancients, where thought “seems to proceed by the movement of a bird which soars and wheels as it goes forward” (ibid., 328). It is centrifugal. Thus, literary writing morphs into a visual graph about literary reading: about new directions and modes of reading that may be nonlinear and enabling different kinds of cognitive processing and emotional engagement. What Sifuentes allows us to grasp graphically about Dickinson’s poetry is this movement of fanning out and unburdening (of content, of meaning) that is the movement of exscription itself. Apparently, the “end” of alphabetic writing and linear thinking is something, a movement, a desire, that has always been internal to it. The end does not come from the outside, from the digital or the post-digital: this end is the very condition that has rendered alphabetic writing, and more so literary, imaginative writing, possible. If, as Carlo Sini assumes, alphabetic writing functions through its invisibility, Sifuentes’s graphic rendering of writing show us that opacity (illegibility, here: excessive visibility, as the surface of writing qua surface is what counts here) may become a form of communication in itself. Opacity, after all, here communicates graphically how a text has been experienced. Seen in this light, demediation does signal not an end but a transformative use of alphabetic script.

Literature, forgetfulness, and the future The questions that Flusser posed in the 1980s—does writing have a future?—are the questions that literary writing is now trying to come to terms with: it is working through alphabetic writing in its relation to overwriting, erasure, and rewriting

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as graphic design. That is to say, literary writing is working through the remains of alphabetic writing: what remains of alphabetic writing today, as writing is rapidly not only being overwritten by code and overtaken but also reimagined by the machine. Literary writing is now already drawing attention to the possibility of the dramatic undoing of alphabetic writing as a constitutive force of historical consciousness. This problem of the receding power of alphabetic writing also surfaces thematically in contemporary cinema and literature: from Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000) and Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder (2007), to Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007), Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), Kunzru’s Memory Palace (2013), or Nicole Krauss’s Man Walks into a Room (2002), alphabetic writing—and, Sonja Neef has shown in Imprint and Trace (2011), more particularly handwriting9—is powerless against the forces of oblivion. Alphabetic writing in these works still inscribes memory, but it is the kind of un-lasting memory that Flusser and McLuhan have associated with oral culture.10 It is a memory constantly overwritten by another present, another connection. Amnesia, dementia, Alzheimer’s: the catchwords of our time. Still, as we have seen in Kunzru’s novella Memory Palace and in Sifuentes’s drawing Fugitive Sparrows, this ominous demise is but one side of literary writings on the wall: forgetfulness and oblivion in times of information overload. The other side, after all, is the opening of the book. As Newell and Salazar quote the Dutch book designer Irma Boom, “In older days, a book was made for spreading information, but now we have the Internet to spread information. So to spread something else—maybe sheer beauty or a much slower, more thoughtprovoking message—it’s the book” (Newell and Salazar 2013, 84). If the machine has taken over writing (if only as technical image), the machine has given ample space to that older machine of the book and paper to imagine writing differently. This is a writing that is more punctually, to recall Sifuentes’s work, less timeconsuming, visually exciting, plastic. Memory Palace and Fugitive Sparrows are typical instantiations of the plasticity of alphabetic writing in the digital age. We may have witnessed this plasticity already in the modernist era. It is true that literary writing in the digital and post-digital era rehearses that modernist plasticity to a great extent: verbal-visual writing, illegible writing, overwriting, erasure—we have seen it all before. The question, however, still remains: Why is that plasticity being rehearsed and reimagined today, and on such a grand scale? What is literary writing announcing that we perhaps cannot yet fully grasp? Is it, indeed, its (altogether) smooth transition into the universe of technical images? As yet these questions remain unanswered. For the time being I think we can

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start to make good use of literature, graphic design works like Fugitive Sparrows, and book arts, to create a media archaeology of alphabetic script that—in the very least—will make literary scholars more critically aware of the plasticity of the material of letters in the comparative study of literature, and of the place of visual writing in such study.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter has appeared as the article “The Dis-Appearance of Writing: Literature and the Imaginary” in the journal Image & Narrative, vol 15, no 4 (2014). I kindly thank Jan Baetens for granting permission. 2 On this, see Bruce and Hogan (1998); Goody (1977); Havelock (1963); Joyce (2002); Innis (1991); Olson and Cole (2006); McLuhan (1964); Ong (1977, 2000); Scribner and Cole (1981); Soukup (2006); and Street (1995). I especially recommend Jonathan Sterne’s (2011) article on Walter Ong, which also gives due attention to Harold Innis, as a critique of the so-called orality/literacy divide. 3 This connection between alphabetic writing and the possibility of critical thinking is, at least, hypothesized quite interestingly by Vilém Flusser in Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? (Göttingen: Immatrix Publications, 1987). I will return to Flusser below. 4 For an important study on literature and the future imaginary—the imaginary of the end—see Gervais (2009). 5 Cf. Henke (2002). Henke, however, starts from a binary opposition between oral and written discourse that may muddle our perception of the relations between the two. 6 Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries display their work online at http://www. yhchang.com/. Jim Andrews’s Spastexts (http://vispo.com) are highly sensitive electronic texts that mutate every time a user touches them: they are unstable palimpsests and to that extent answer to Marjorie Perloff ’s (2006) idea of a “differential text.” 7 It is important to stress that Sini relies heavily on Havelock in his philosophy of writing as historically contingent. 8 I have proposed reading Tree of Codes as such an archive—of Foer reading Schulz (see Brillenburg Wurth 2011a). 9 In an article on the handwritten works of the Canadian book artist Louise Paillé, I have addressed the issue of handwriting in depth (see Brillenburg Wurth 2014). Here, I instead focus on writing as a medium technology. 10 I have written about this development of memory erasure and writing extensively elsewhere (see Brillenburg Wurth 2011b).

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Works cited Auster, Paul, 2006. Travels in the Scriptorium. New York: Picador. Avrin, Leila, 1991. Scribes, Script, and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Chicago; London: American Library Association; British Library. Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 1981. “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 3–40. Houston: University of Texas Press. Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene, 2011a. “Old and New Medialities in Foer’s Tree of Codes.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13 (3). doi:10.7771/1481-4374.1800. Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene, 2011b. “Posthumanities and Post-textualities: Reading The Raw Shark Texts and Woman’s World. ” Comparative Literature 63 (2): 119–41. doi:10.1215/00104124-1265447 Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene, 2014. “Diffraction, Handwriting, and Intramediality in Louise Paillé’s Livres livres.” Parallax 20 (3): 258–73. doi:10.1080/13534645.2014.92 7633 Bruce, Bertram C. and Hogan, Maureen C., 1998. “The Disappearance of Technology: Toward an Ecological Model of Literacy.” In Handbook of Literacy and Technology: Transformations in a Post-Typographic World. Edited by David Reinking, Michael C. McKenna, Linda D. Labbo, and Ronald D. Kieffer, 269–81. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Derrida, Jacques, 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Flusser, Vilém, 1985. Ins Universum der technischen Bilder. Göttingen: European Photography. Flusser, Vilém, 1987. Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? Göttingen: Immatrix. Flusser, Vilém, 2011a. Does Writing Have a Future? Translated by Nancy Ann Roth, introduction by Mark Poster. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Flusser, Vilém, 2011b. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth, introduction by Mark Poster. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gervais, Bertrand, 2009. L’Imaginaire de la fin. Temps, mots et signes. Logiques de l’imaginaire – tome III. Montreal: Le Quartanier. Gnanadesikan, Amalia E., 2009. The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Goody, Jack, 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Steven, 2007. The Raw Shark Texts. Edinburgh: Canongate. Haring, B. J. J., 2015. “Halaham ̣ on an Ostracon of the Early New Kingdom?” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 74: 189–96. Havelock, Eric A., 1963. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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Henke, Robert, 2002. Composition and Performance in the Commedia Dell’Arte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Houston, Stephen D., ed. 2004. The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Innis, Harold, 1991 [1951]. The Bias of Communication. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Joyce, Michael, 2002. “No One Tells You This: Secondary Orality and Hypertextuality.” Oral Tradition 17 (2): 325–45. http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/17ii/joyce Krauss, Nicole, 2002. Man Walks into a Room. New York: Doubleday. Kunzru, Hari, 2013. Memory Palace. Curated by Laurie Britton Newell and Ligaya Salazar. London: V&A Publishing. Malabou, Catherine, 2009. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press. McCarthy, Tom, 2007. Remainder. New York: Vintage. McLuhan, Marshall, 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin, 1967. The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books. Nancy, Jean-Luc, 1993. “Exscription.” Translated by Katherine Lydon. In The Birth to Presence, 319–40. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Naveh, Joseph, 1982. The Early History of the Alphabet. Jerusalem and Leiden: Magnes Press and Brill. Neef, Sonja, 2011. Handwriting in the Age of Technology. London: Reaktion Books. Newell, Laurie Britton and Salazar, Ligaya, 2013. “Curating a Book.” In Memory Palace. By Hari Kunzru, curated by Laurie Britton Newell and Ligaya Salazar. London: V&A Publishing. Nolan, Christopher, dir. 2000. Memento. Los Angeles, CA: Newmarket Films. Olson, David R., 2016. The Mind on Paper. Reading, Consciousness and Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olson, David R. and Cole, Michael, eds. 2006. Technology, Literacy and the Evolution of Society: Implications of the Work of Jack Goody. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ong, Walter S. J., 1977. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ong, Walter S. J., 2000. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge. Perloff, Marjorie, 2006. “Screening the Page/Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text.” In New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Edited by Adelaide Morris and Thomas Swiss, 143–62. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Pressman, Jessica, 2009. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (4). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo. act2080.0048.402

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Schnapp, Jeffrey and Michaels, Adam, 2012. The Electronic Information Age Book. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scribner, Sylvia and Cole, Michael, 1981. The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sifuentes, Zachary, n.d. Fugitive Poetics. http://www.fugitivepoetics.com. (Site discontinued, accessible via the Internet Archive). Sifuentes, Zachary, 2010. Fugitive Sparrows: An Emily Dickinson Installation. Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Sini, Carlo, 2009. Ethics of Writing. Translated by Silvia Benso with Brian Schroeder. Albany : State University of New York Press. Soukup, Paul A., 2006. “Contexts of Faith: The Religious Foundation of Walter Ong’s Literacy and Orality.” Journal of Media and Religion 5 (3): 175–88. doi:10.1207/ s15328415jmr0503_4 Sterne, Jonathan, 2011. “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality.” Canadian Journal of Communication 36 (2): 207–25. doi:10.22230/cjc.2011v36n2a2223 Street, Brian, 1995. Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy Development, Ethnography, and Education. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

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Revisiting the Book-as-World: WorldMaking and Book Materiality in Only Revolutions and The Atlas Inge van de Ven

Only because the past is dead is one able to read it. Only because history is fetishized in physical objects can one understand it. Only because the book is a world can one enter it. —Susan Sontag, “Under the Sign of Saturn” (2002, 126) Under the influence of conjoined processes of digitalization and globalization, our world seems to be at once smaller and larger than ever. The world has always been unrepresentable in its vastness, the ultimate instance of Kant’s mathematical sublime, that “which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses” (2000, §25, 134). There is no outside position from which we could possibly form a representation of the world, because we take part in it (we are worldly, of this world, even when we observe it from space). Further, it is an open question whether we can even speak of the world, as coterminous with the earth. In Earth and World: Philosophy after the Apollo Missions (2015), Kelly Oliver points to a tension between “world” and “earth,” and argues that we should differentiate between sharing the earth and sharing a world. This is in line with recent materialist and feminist concepts of autre-mondialisation (other-worlding), which emphasize “world” as something we make or do, and which can be made differently (see Haraway 2008). At the same time, under the pressures of late globalization, our shared world has become too small. We seem to have mapped and charted geographical space to the millimeter. Science has revealed the inner workings of phenomena from the smallest quark to the largest ecosystem. We are able to travel the globe with increasing ease. There seem to be no more “other worlds,” no measures

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of comparison. Any medium through which we seek to represent “the whole world” has to contend with this paradox: it is too big and too small. Gayatri Spivak has famously introduced the planetary in Death of a Discipline (2003) as an alternative conceptualization for the world in World Literature. Departing from “world” and “globe,” “planet” does not denote a structured and measured geopolitical totality. Rather, it serves to describe a relational worldsystem, at once “calculable and beyond reckoning” (Rapaport 2011, 221). It is characterized by multiplicity, open-endedness, and sociocultural potentialities. The planet is not a closed system. Neither closed nor finished, neither an attained finitude nor a teleology, this system is evolving and expanding, a world but not  the world, a “webbed interrelatedness” covering most of the world but not coterminous with it (Emery 2012, 49). Spivak’s imperative to reimagine the planet was always an ethical one, as this reorientation emphasizes relationality. The enterprise is non-totalizing because of this built-in relationality. In their reflections on the “connective tissues binding America[n literature] to the rest of the world” (Dimock 2008, 3), scholars like Wai Chee Dimock and Mark McGurl probe the question of scale by pointing to alternative conceptions of time and space. Dimock, in Through Other Continents (2006), recalibrates American literary history by inserting into it a larger frame of the planet’s geographical and historical span, which she calls “deep time.” In Dimock’s view, literary scholars should not limit themselves to the relatively young national boundaries of the United States, but rather take into account the planet’s global extension and duration. “Deep time” connects distant periods, nations, and species. In The Program Era (2009), McGurl phrases the question of scale in criticism as follows: We can close-read or contextualize at various geographical scales; we can consider one text or many; we can track cultural developments in a certain “historical moment” or across the centuries: given that the attention span of criticism is highly variable, what might a self-consciousness of scale bring to our critical practice? (2009, 402)

In this chapter, I argue that the book-bound novel has proven to be a fitting receptacle for imaginative reflections on these matters: both the vast un-representability of the globe and how the United States intersects with the rest of the world. Thematically, these questions of representing the global figure prominently in the works of Roberto Bolaño, David Mitchell, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Jonathan Franzen.

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Yet in rarer cases, the book itself becomes a meaningful site for working through these negotiations of scale. In the present chapter, I analyze two such cases of novels that strive to make sense of incongruences or scale variances between the national and the global, or even the close-at-home and the planetary, by incorporating their material properties as book-bound novels in their narratives. I argue that William T. Vollmann’s The Atlas (1996) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006) perform matters of globalization and scale by making us experience the book as a space that is self-enclosed and simultaneously exceeds all representations. Both works can be described as “hybrid”: rather than “merely” illustrative, materiality and visual design are here fully integrated as a structural dimension of the narrative. These novels probe the question: What constitutes a book? In 1975, Ulises Carrión investigated this question. Far from a mere container of words, he sees the book as “a sequence of spaces” but also “a sequence of moments, . . . an autonomous space-time sequence.” What Carrión calls “The New Art of Making Books” is the making of an autonomous and selfsufficient form, with a text that emphasizes that form, as an organic part of it (7). Johanna Drucker gives the following description of the unique possibilities that the codex offers, precisely because of its delimited form: The structural boundedness of the book and the discreteness of the delimited page make the expansions produced by intercutting, insertion, or other means, into significant gestures, inserting tension in the necessarily finite form of the codex; the theoretically infinite extension of an electronic document can’t register such elements as a meaningful transgression of limits. The space within a book can be understood as both literal and conceptual. (1997, 99)

The Atlas and Only Revolutions employ these characteristics in a meaningful integration. The shape and texture of book, page, and print all play into this dynamic. This chapter investigates how Vollmann and Danielewski exploit the mediumspecific features of the codex in order to reverse the familiar trope of the bookas-world (e.g., Goodman 1978; Pavel 1986) into the world-as-book. The worlds that Vollmann and Danielewski project are therefore highly unstable: the contained and the container, world and book, constantly bleed into one another. In The Atlas and Only Revolutions, I argue, the book-object spatially performs our experiences of worldliness under the influence of globalization. Drawing on Jean-Luc-Nancy (1997, 2007), I will characterize this status quo as a collapse of the (spatial and conceptual) division of the world into an “inside”

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and an “outside” domain. I then show how The Atlas and Only Revolutions perform the “retreat of the outside” that marks late globalization,1 by playing with the capacity of the book to bind and encapsulate narrative spaces. Both present the reader with characters’ attempts at escape through digressive movement and narration in a world without a beyond. In both novels, moreover, the main characters are curiously aware of being contained in the material book. In my analyses of these works, I tease out a relation between the constraint caused by material and the constraints the characters face in trying to attain a worldly perspective. Both narratives are critically encompassed, bounded, and framed not only by the covers of the book, but also by a set of “American” values and outlooks on the world. By foregrounding the inescapability of such a limited, colored, perspective on the world, I argue, Danielewski’s and Vollmann’s acts of world-forming go against the idea of the globe as an already totalized entity available to the panoptic gaze of a viewer. They use the materiality of the book to remind us of the impossibility of attaining an objective view of a world that we, as observers, are ourselves part of. In doing so, both authors reinvent the book as, on the one hand, a space to escape in, and, on the other, and a space that is impossible to escape from. Bound and boundless, as a spatialized metaphor for our experiences of worldliness under the influence of globalization, the bookas-world-as-book is what I call with Nancy a “non-totalizable totality” (2007, 58)—a term he borrows from quantum mechanics to designate the world as an entity that is at once both finite and infinite in its diffractions and permutations. I argue that it is precisely this paradoxical characteristic as both infinitely producing new meanings and readings, and being bound in an absolute sense, that link the book to the world as a concept—or rather, a collection of possible worlds. Ultimately, reading these two novels together will offer insight into how literature can exploit its material instantiation to make sense of overly familiar experiences of being-in-the-world between a national and global perspective.

World-making and the book-as-world The ambition to capture the world between the covers of the book in general, or the novel in particular, has been persistent throughout the history of literature. The idea of the book-as-world has known many forms: from Bakhtin’s conceptualization of the novel as containing, like the societal world, numerous voices or “heteroglossia” (1981) to Blanchot’s Le livre à venir (1959); from

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Mallarmé’s famous insistence that “everything in the world exists to end up in a book” (Arnar 2011, 312) to Joyce’s Ulysses as “book as world” (French 1978) and the attempts of Goethe scholars to create the “Book of Everything” (Piper 2006); and from Vargas Llosa’s novela totalizadora (Brody 1977) to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s historical account of early print technology and the vision of the book usurping all media (2002), Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (1986) and of course Borges, for instance in his “Library of Babel” (1941). And the idea can be traced further back to St. Augustine and to Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage” from As You Like It. The age-old dream of “fitting the whole world inside the single text” (Portelli 1994, 100) is pervasive; hence the “revisiting” in this chapter’s title. The book has been to the age of print what the internet is to the electronic age. Yet what is different about today’s world-books, I argue, is that they operate on the intersections of processes of digitalization and late globalization (Moraru 2011; Hardt and Negri 2001). In a period of digitization of information, the enclosure of texts between the covers of the book can become a meaningful gesture, especially when texts intentionally make it meaningful. Further, the link between the world and the book enables today’s book-bound novels to make sense of, and give material form to, specifically late-global experiences of scale incongruences, of the world being simultaneously bigger and smaller than ever, and of the lack of a beyond. In order to elucidate this I now turn to Jean-Luc Nancy, and in particular his distinction between globalization and mondialisation, the latter implying a making of a world. In The Sense of the World (1997) and The Creation of the World or Globalization (2007), Nancy diagnoses a situation in late globalization in which the “beyond” retreats from our world, resulting in worldwide uniformity. Under an onto-theological worldview, Nancy explains, the world’s meaning still resided outside of the world, as a promise of transcendence. God signifies such another world placed next to our world, “a God distinct from the world would be another world” (2007, 45). With the decline of this onto-theological worldview, he argues, we lost the meaning of a world that was arranged by God and that operated according to the stabilities of a Newtonian universe. The twenty-first century marks the loss of the sense of “a mundus, a cosmos” as a “composed and complete order (from) within which one might find a place, a dwelling, and the elements of an orientation” (1997, 4). Order and orientation can no longer be derived from transcendental anchoring points outside of the material, existential space we inhabit. At this point the world could no longer refer to another world

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and became radically immanent, writes Nancy: “The partition between exterior and interior, that is, this distinction between different ‘worlds’ that seemed to us to configure the world, has been subverted and conflated into one” (Nancy 1997,  6). It becomes impossible to determine the meaning or “sense” of our world from the perspective of an outside position. The world disintegrates as a unit of meaning. According to Nancy, this development has accelerated and intensified with the world’s becoming global, which furthers the retreat of the borders between what formerly constituted different worlds, leaving us with one uniform “worldwideness.” The orb dissolves in a non-place of global multiplicity, as a result of which the different parts of the globe (such as the rural in relation to the urban) lose their distinction. This also changes the ways in which we move across global spaces. Since the meaning of the world is no longer located outside, it now resides in the passage to the limit, in “sense as navigation to (or on) the confines of space” (1997, 40). A world without an outside cannot be crossed over, only traversed from one border to another. Nancy invokes a notion of the planetary as an immanent space, in which movement takes the form of the digressive, or the radically “errant”: “The entire world will have become planetary: wandering from one end to the other” (43). Nancy does not stop at this negative assessment: he proposes an alternative notion of worldliness to contrast this anti-creative force of globalization: opposed to the global he posits the worldly, or mondialisation. This untranslatable term refers to an authentic world-forming (faire-monde), or creation of the world. World-forming is never finished, it is a process in continuous expansion. Unlike the abstract unitotality of the global, mondialisation maintains a crucial reference to the world’s horizon, as a space of human relations, of significations and meanings held in common. Nancy does not inscribe this project in particular cultural practices; in fact he insists that the creation of the world does not have a subject or author (2007, 12, 49). As a consequence, his characterization of mondialisation remains remarkably abstract, given its aim of counteracting the abstract world of globalizing processes. I argue that we can understand this concept as akin to authoring a world, as in writing a novel. After all, Nancy also writes, “A world perhaps always, at least potentially, shares the unity proper to the work of art. That is, unless it is the opposite, or rather, unless the reciprocity between ‘world’ and ‘art’ is constitutive of both” (1997, 42). The lack of a dehors or an “outside” that Nancy diagnoses, coincides with a shift from transcendence to immanence and, importantly, from idealism to materialism. Becoming

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“worldly,” after all, has to do with getting one’s hands dirty, with touch and with being-in-common (Nancy 2007; Haraway 2008). The historical moment of late globalization, marked by discourses on “alter-globalisation” and planetarity, coincides with a shift to bookishness. This, I believe, is at stake with Vollmann and Danielewski: a reciprocity between world and book as continuously forming, reforming, and deforming each other. Both capture the modern experience of living in a globalized world as are configured as circular structures, a being-encapsulated. The Atlas and Only Revolutions precisely engage in the process of world-making. As acts of world-forming, they continue in the tradition of theories such as Thomas Pavel’s Fictional Worlds (1986), which holds that literary texts may refer to multiple alternative fictional worlds as well as to the “actual world,” and Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978) where he claims that the world as such is unknowable. All we can capture in representations, Goodman states, are versions, “ways” of the world, none more “real” than the others, described from a certain perspective and captured in a symbolic system. The Atlas and Only Revolutions complicate these general theories in that they do not create symbolic “new worlds” as such, or imagine the book as a fictive world. Instead, they imagine the world in, and as, the material form of the book. Rather than advocating the production of alternative worlds, novels like Danielewski’s and Vollmann’s subvert the pervasive metaphor of the book-asworld by turning it around: the world as a book. They do this by drawing attention to the characteristics of the book that it shares with the world: its self-enclosed nature on the one hand, and the ability to produce infinite new meanings and readings on the other. They perform the late-global experience of the lack of an outside position, the collapse of the (spatial and conceptual) division of the world into an “inside” and an “outside” domain, by figuring characters who are aware of being contained and encapsulated in the material book. On a narrative level, this is connected to a reflection on scale variances in how the United States intersects with the rest of the world. Vollmann’s and Danielewski’s works display an awareness of the fact that the national perspective is not so easy to transcend or shake off. “Even in a so-called post-national age,” as Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney remind us, “‘the national’ as a framework for identity and memorymaking is still a powerful one” (2014: 6). Both authors acknowledge this through a critical engagement with traditions of American myth-making, and through archetypical representations of the American figure abroad. I argue that Vollmann and Danielewski exploit the volumetric aspect of the book-object, its

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three-dimensional, spatial affordances, as well as its finite character, precisely to enact the experience that Nancy writes about: inhabiting an enclosed world without a beyond, lacking a sense of orientation or external anchoring points. The book becomes at once a space to escape in and space that is impossible to escape from—a non-totalizable totality.

Journey to the covers of the earth: Vollmann trapped inside his Atlas Born in 1959, Vollmann is an artist of the 1980s and 1990s, who witnessed the emergence of a radically globalized world. He traverses the globe for his journalistic work and out of personal interests. The Atlas is a collection of fragments that record an American traveler’s experiences all over the world—in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mexico, the United States, Thailand, Australia, Cambodia, etc. Like pages in a real atlas, The Atlas includes a Gazetteer (xvii–xxii) which gives us the exact coordinates of these places on the earth’s surface, such as “Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island, Northwest Territories, Canada 74.40 N, 95.00 W” and “Paris, Département Paris, Région Parisienne, France 48.52 N, 2.20 E.” In The Atlas, the structure of the text is an indispensable element of the meaning of the work. It begins with a section entitled “Opening the Book,” which is followed by twenty-six numbered chapters. At the center of the novel is a novella called “The Atlas” and, after this, another twenty-six chapters follow. This time, the chapters are numbered backward from 26 to 1. This makes the structure of the novel symmetrical, revolving around the spine’s rotational axis; an axis of convergence for both narrative structure and the materiality of the book. Thematically as well as structurally, the collection of stories is arranged like a palindrome: “The motif in the first story is taken up again in the last; the second story finds its echo in the second to last, and so on” (xvi). Thus, Vollmann emphasizes the presentation of his travels as an inherently regressive way of traversing the globe, as suggested by the Greek root of “palindrome”; meaning recurring, or “running back again.” In the palindromic structure of The Atlas, the absence of beginning or end determines the form of the novel as a whole. The narrator’s voyage is bound to lead him back home again, which detracts from the usual “objective” status of the atlas as a representation of the world. From the beginning it is clear that this textual object is emphatically Vollmann’s atlas.

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The novel’s text, like the voyage it depicts, is not linear: it is not meant to be read all the way through. Vollmann encourages his reader to “keep [the book] by you as a pillow-book, reading through it in no particular order, skipping the tales you find tedious” (xv). Thus, a digressive way of reading is promoted to match both Vollmann’s unsystematic manner of traversing the planet and the skips and breaks of his narration. In the tradition of tabular texts such as George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978) and Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), The Atlas spatializes information (see Vandendorpe 2009, 22–27). Visually as well as thematically, The Atlas draws our attention to the book itself as a container of narrative spaces and as an embodied cartographical metaphor. The book opens on a title page with an inserted pictorial representation of the globe, while the pivotal chapter depicts maps of the globe as projected from the North and South Poles (The Atlas 266), showing both ends of the earth’s rotation axis. In the front matter are printed reproductions of plates from an old-fashioned atlas depicting Eastern and Western Hemispheres and North and South poles. These images are intentionally distorted in such a way as to resemble the hemispheres of the human brain. In this respect, they reinforce the palindromic form in their mutual attachment. Moreover, these distorted hemispheres form a closed system without a shared “outside,” suggesting it is as impossible to move outside one’s own brain, as it is to step outside of the atlas. Aptly, Vollmann informs the reader that “what you hold . . . is but a piecemeal atlas of the world I think in” (xv). These words, combined with the distorted, brain-shaped images of hemispheres, are suggestive of the idiosyncratic nature and deformations inherent to Vollmann’s and, by extension, all acts of mapping (see Wood and Fells 1992, 60; Pinder 1996). The conception of the atlas that Vollmann hints at (“easy pages lay ahead,” 294) is a familiar representation of the world reduced to a portable object. According to Christian Vandendorpe, historically “it was the page that made it possible for text to break away from the continuity and linearity of the scroll and allowed it to be much more easily manipulated. Over the course of a slow but irreversible evolution, the page made the text part of the tabular order” (29). Because of this tabular quality, we can open the book on any page we want to, we can hover above and beyond it. In the case of The Atlas, as an observer of space, the subject remains unobserved and disembodied, outside the controlling gaze (Farman 2010, 81). This is why, in Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard specifically chooses the example of the map to exemplify his famous postmodern critique of representation (“The territory no

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longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it,” 1994, 1). The idea that we can grasp the earth as an object, like a manufactured globe that we can control and manage, is caused by “illusions of mastery and globalism” (Oliver 2015, 4). In many ways the atlas is the ultimate representation of control over the world. Arguably, no other mode of representation has been taken to be as neutral and objective (Craib 2000, 8). We can never transcend the world and know it. Karen Barad reminds us of this fact through her concept of entanglement, denoting the deeply connected way that everything is entangled with everything else, which implies that any act of observation makes a “cut” between what is included and excluded from being considered. “Practices of knowing and being,” she argues, “are not isolatable, but rather they are mutually implicated. We do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because ‘we’ are of the world” (2003: 829). The objects of our maps, charts, and calculations are fully entangled with these measurements themselves. Maps should be read as representations of “the culture that produces them as much as they are a representation of a section of the earth or activities upon it” (MacEachren 1995, 10). Displaying an awareness of these considerations in its paratext, which is its performative aspect, Vollmann’s novel, while emulating the atlas (the all-encompassing text par excellence), subverts its claims to “total representation” in its very form. That this partial, biased perspective of the atlas is to an important extent a national perspective can be deduced from the beginning and end of The Atlas. Even though the palindromic structure of the book causes a regression that precludes any determinate beginnings and endings, the geographic parameters of The Atlas are clearly inscribed within the material space of the book. These parameters are reinforced by one of the major structural features of the codex: finitude. The opening section, “Opening the Book,” is set at Grand Central Station, New York City. The closing section, called “Closing the Book,” is set at another train station in Sacramento, California. As a framing device, these sections indicate a movement from the East to the West Coast, which is the traditional route of colonists associated with the American Manifest Destiny: of expansion, imperialism, and the search for freedom. “The east of my youth and the west of my future,” as Dean Moriarty says in Kerouac’s On the Road (2000, 15). Choosing these specific locations to frame his cosmopolitan journeys, Vollmann implicates himself in this tradition. His journeys are literally “bound” by these parameters, underlining the American character of his quest. This

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matches the incapacity, reflected in his narration, to shake off the US-centered nature of his worldly experiences. Despite his wealth and the ease with which he travels the globe, Vollmann’s mapmaker is anything but free or unobserved. He meets numerous others who return his gaze. In Canada’s Northwest Territories, he joins native hunters who are hunting walrus, and is faced with a hostile attitude: “The boy who hated white people sat sullenly with his back turned toward me . . . I was only allowed along because I had paid three hundred dollars” (23). At other times, these others look at him and see the possibility of earning money: “Looking up at his giant blinking eye, little girls in red and yellow garbashars stood and tried to sell him packs of cigarettes” (152). He is an object of gazes that convey of feelings of resentment and hopes of financial benefit. Paradoxically, the globalized world in its “openness” is a prison for him, causing loneliness, isolation, and exclusion. Vollmann’s work thus concretizes Nancy’s assessment of the lack of the beyond in late globalization. Trying to find transcendence in these “exotic” locales yet trapped in his limited American perspective, his narrator must keep moving without the meaningful promise of an outside to the world. He is “on the move” precisely because the political and economic influence of the United States is global, and thus cannot be escaped. Whereas Vollmann’s wealth and inborn restlessness allow him to expand his geographical horizon, at the same time it is precisely his “Americanness” that prevents him from rewriting himself. The reader soon realizes that the atlas is gaining mastery over its owner, the traveling narrator, instead of the other way around. Far from any position of control, Vollmann’s wandering narrator is trapped inside the atlas. One of the symptoms of postmodernity and late capitalism is a widespread conflation of the map with the territory (Baudrillard’s hyperreality, confirmed daily by Google Maps and other geographical information systems). The question Vollmann raises is whether there is a way out of the atlas that does not equal some metaphysical escapism. This entrapment inside the atlas is not “just” a metaphor: his narrator and alter ego at several points reveals an awareness of the material book that contains him and that he cannot move beyond. The narrator’s predicament of being caught inside the book is literalized in a chapter called “Outside and Inside.” In a bookstore, a male customer is leafing through the pages of “a thirtyeight color picture book printed on paper as smooth as a virgin’s thigh” (394) when outside a fight breaks out. A male panhandler sends his female adversary crashing through the bookstore window. The violent outside world intrudes

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upon the seemingly innocent inner world of books. The customer, trying to help the woman, “opened his book and invited her in. . . . Spangles of blood struck the pages like a mystery rain, becoming words which had never existed before” (395). Her blood transgresses the boundaries between the inside and outside of the book. The male character, with the best of intentions, tries to save the oppressed female other by “collecting” her in his book. Like the female panhandler, Vollmann’s narrator is by no means in a position of control or mastery over his objects of representation, because he himself is just as much part of his atlas. He, too, is encapsulated in the world-as-book and is aware of this predicament: Where is the book you put me in? asked the woman. This is the atlas, he said. This is the book.—And he bent down and touched the pavement. He knew that everything was set upon a single page. Open the book, she said weakly. It’s open already. Where am I, then? Am I inside or outside? I don’t know, he murmured, suddenly resentful. I don’t know where I am anymore, either. I lost my freedom because of you. (399)

This book-space does not allow him the safety of the unobserved gaze. Instead of hovering above the book as a prototypical mapmaker, he is caught in an intermediate space in which both he and the woman are recorded in, and by, the (material) atlas. Thus, Vollmann uses the form of the book as a navigable space and material carrier to unmask as illusory the ideal of a position of overview and of objective representation of the world. In its foregrounding of both spatial and narrative digressions, The Atlas points to the material book as a tabular and “navigable” narrative space. Such a conceptualization is taken further in Danielewski’s Only Revolutions, to which I now turn.

Around the world in 360 pages: Only Revolutions as a non-totalizable totality Like The Atlas, Danielewski’s Only Revolutions covers an exceptionally large territory, while at the same time resisting the idea of the novel (and the self) as a perfectly self-enclosed form. It is as a textual system that is at once complete in itself and open to the world, or, as I will characterize this

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form with Nancy:  a non-totalizable totality. Only Revolutions tells the story of Hailey and Sam through chiasmically juxtaposed stream-of-consciousness monologues.2 After falling in love at first sight, these perpetual sixteen-yearolds embark upon a road trip through time and space, across the United States and its history. With this experimental novel, Danielewski wanted to create a book that cannot exist online, to investigate what books do that digital media cannot do: “I think that’s the bar that the Internet is driving towards: how to further emphasize what is different and exceptional about books” (qtd. in Cottrell 2000).3 To show how he achieves this, I first describe the complex spatial architecture of this novel. In Only Revolutions, everything revolves in circles. The book consists of 360 pages, each of which contains 360 words; the page numbers are enclosed in circles that revolve if you flip the pages. The first letters of every eighth page together form an infinite loop that goes “. . . Sam and Hailey and Sam and Hailey . . . .” This circular structure also comes back in the bodily gestures of reading. Each half of the story is narrated in portions of eight pages. The reader has to decide on which end to begin, and to turn the book over and around periodically for the narrative to unfold. The end of Sam’s story implies the beginning of Hailey’s story (in 1963), whose end (in 2063) in turn implies a return to the beginning of Sam’s (in 1863). This lends the narrative the form of a Möbius strip, a story loop with an impossible twist: both versions end with the death of the other character. The final pages of each half (359–60) prompt us to start over at the other end. Like Vollmann’s palindrome, this circular structure forebodes the inevitability of return. Hailey and Sam’s movements across the world, like those of Vollmann’s narrator, are regressive, always “running back again,” which follows from the impossibility of escaping or transcending the book/world. The sensory space of the book that is Only Revolutions is foregrounded as a three-dimensional, chiasmic space. Everything that happens is mirrored on the other side as the narratives gradually move closer to each other until they meet and unite, only to be separated again. The middle pages (180–81) function as the axis of symmetry around which all these mirrors revolve. Here, the two monologues become identical, rendering a state of perfect balance between Hailey and Sam, after which they move further apart again. For each page, there are three counterpoints with corresponding lines: for instance, Hailey’s first page (H1) is counterpointed with the symmetric page in her own narrative (H360), the same page in Sam’s narrative (S1), and the symmetric page in Sam’s narrative (S360, printed upside down on the same page). Resulting from the structure

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of the chiasm, the visual space of Only Revolutions is at once a two- and threedimensional space. Reading one story after another in a linear fashion is an act that produces interlinked, twinned stories of a linear progression from youth to death, with each a duration of four seasons and one hundred years. This is a responsible reading that performs a “worlding” of the text and brings historical consciousness into the narration; yet, it is also a demythologizing act of reading that splits Sam and Hailey apart. The alternative, cyclical reading, by contrast, is a romantic act that allows them their “being-with” or “being-in-common,” sharing a world. This strategy, however, is informed by a selective historical amnesia and also disregards the happenings elsewhere in the world. Either way, the reader is implicated, made complicit by the mere act of reading. This is a way for literature to remind us that, as Walkowitz has argued, “any small action . . . needs to assume the same ethical and political significance as the more expansive system of actions in which it should be seen to participate” (2007, 218). Even more than The Atlas, in Danielewski’s novel the national and the global constantly bleed into each other. Only Revolutions, too, inscribes itself specifically in the American cultural imaginary. The theme of spatial exploration, central to Only Revolutions, typifies an American mythology of the individual who discovers his identity by moving outward, exploring and discovering the outside world. At the novel’s dual beginnings, the characters find themselves alone in a vast and unknown space. Fittingly, they begin and end their adventures on foot, traversing a romanticized wilderness evocative of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s State of Nature. This wilderness is unmistakably American, judging from the species of flora and fauna referenced, such as bald eagles, boreal toads, bighorn sheep, and lubber grasshoppers, Trembling Aspens, Tamarack Pines, and Snowberries. “I’m sooooo from these uplands,” Hailey roars, “From corries and chines. / From the freezeloss and slowwash / slushgushing out of basins / and brooks to miles of / Northern Rock Jasmine growing” (H35). This sense of territorialization diminishes when they build up speed and start traveling the world together. One minute they soar above the earth’s surface and see the world pass by with an impassionate eye (“agony / of all I skitter by so easily,” S41). The next moment they cross through a city street, locally immersed but still “unassailable.” Their narration performs a series of scalar expansions and contractions: an effortless “zapping” from the extremely distant to the intimately close, from national to local, the particular to the general. Sam and Hailey seem to be in full control and acknowledge neither laws nor restraints: “I will sacrifice nothing.

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For there are no conflicts. Except me. And there’s only one transgression. Me” (H3). Their global travels are seemingly without borders: “I will sacrifice nothing. For there are no countries. Except me. And there is only one boundary. Me” (S3). Their adventures on the road read like a fairytale of unbridled transnationalism. The whole world serves as a geospatial database for their trajectory: Amortized. Fueled. Ready to pour it on. / Our new 911 Cabriolet, nelly, natch to lay / a batch from St. Louis. Budapest, Santiago, / Warsaw. Amsterdam, Shanghai, New Delhi. / Lisbon. Every city. Roam. Air sharper. / Promises harder. Driving US from the ages. (H216)

The transnational here stands for freedom: it promises acts of deterritorialization from the nation-state. Yet, as in The Atlas, these transnational wanderings are still inscribed in the national, American framework. Sam and Hailey are archetypically American in their repeated insistence on “the Dream” (“Everyone betrays the Dream but who cares for it?” H360). In their shared story of escape from their particular sociohistorical contexts through perpetual motion, they are transhistorical personifications of the country that claims to remain “forever young”: “Allmighty sixteen and so freeeeee” (S1). They refer to themselves as US. Their belief in their ability to relocate and begin ever anew ties them to the same characteristics of their home country that marked Vollmann’s wanderings: restlessness (“Where there’s a wheel, there’s a way. / And we’re always awaying” (S225) and rootlesness (“allways we will leave US / behind US,” H290). Perfectly self-enclosed, their selfimages are of a system without an outside: the image of the book that emerges from such passages is that of the Möbius strip—a surface with only one side and one boundary: “I’m unavoidable. No beneath / underneath. No over / above. Just one side” (SH30); “I’m the all. The all available / Ever now. Ever here. / Allways unavailable” (S27). They are not of the world; they are the world. Yet, this by no means makes them “disembodied master subjects” who are able to perceive “everything from nowhere” (Haraway 1991, 189). Even if they blow themselves out of all proportions, Sam and Hailey cannot escape from their idiosyncratic viewpoints. This sense of limited focalization is underwritten by the book’s color coding. In Hailey’s half of the book zeros and the character “o” are printed in gold; in Sam’s half they are printed in green, signifying the colors of their eyes, respectively, “gold eyes with flecks of green” (S7) and “green eyes with flecks of gold” (H7). Their outlook on the world is literally “colored,” we see their worlds, through their eyes.

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The couple’s dream of escape and control over their worlds is further shattered by the role of history in Only Revolutions. The outside world, culture, and history are at their heels at every turn, threatening their self-proclaimed rootlessness and limitlessness. At times, the emphasis is on (active) escape (“Driving US from the ages,” H216; emphasis mine); at other times they rather seem hunted, passive (“Chasing US to our ages,” S216; emphasis mine). They have to stay in motion to steer clear of the lasso of time: “Yes, maybe it’s time to move on. / Spare some our hurt before / the World retakes what we always / elude when we run” (H209). Their joyride is a flight from a history that forces them to live in two separate worlds. After all, to stand still would mean to be pinned down at different points on the Möbius strip, to be tied to one’s historical and geographical contexts. Hence, they do not remain in perpetual motion because they are free: they have to keep moving to remain free. Sam and Hailey are forced to keep moving as they are enclosed in an immanent world. They flee from their guilt of evading the world. But even if they do, in a superficial sense, transcend the spatial and temporal grid that demarcates their nation-state, that grid does not cease to exist. One of the ways in which the national impinges on the global and vice versa, is found in the “chronomosaics.” These are columns of historical fragments placed in the inner margins of each page that list events. These are dated from November 22, 1863, to May 29, 2005, with blank entries continuing thereafter until January 19, 2063.4 Thus, in the chronomosaics, the “outside” world is inscribed in the pages of Sam and Hailey’s lives—albeit literally marginalized on the page. These timelines perform a historical (and geographical) scale enlargement akin to those proposed by Fernand Braudel and the Annales school, a history to be measured in centuries. According to Dimock, the continuum of historical life does not grant the privilege of autonomy to any spatial locale; it does not grant the privilege of autonomy to any temporal segment. The nation, as a segmenting device, is vulnerable for just that reason. It is constantly stretched, punctured, and infiltrated. Territorial sovereignty is poor prophylactic. (2008, 4)

Sam and Hailey can initially be read along as a figure for an isolated American literature onto itself, “not burdened by the chronology and geography outside the nation” (2008, 2). Yet, the historical and the worldly threaten to catch up with the outlaw couple at every turn. At several points, details from the “gutters” of history

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find their way into their text. The differentialization of contextual details creates a pervasive, ominous sense that the external world is on the verge of impinging upon the lovers’ shared world. The perfection of their closed circle is interrupted by the interference of these temporal and “openended” lines, injecting historical consciousness into the world they created. With these hints at historical consciousness, the world seeps in, or rather, exposes itself as always already their world: pursued by time, they are worldly, of the world. A “responsible” reading with attention to the specific timelines would gesture toward what Oliver calls an “earth ethics.” Rather than assimilating the earth’s heterogeneity into a global world, such an ethics abjures a “totalizing discourse” that “does not allow for difference, or even history, but rather insists on dominating everything that is” (2015, 31). Instead, it poses a shared practice of intelligibility. Inhabiting separate universes that are, moreover, perfectly enclosed in their creator’s circular composition, the protagonists are trapped inside the book as a bounded space, like “Vollmann” in his atlas. Sam and Hailey at times seem to be curiously aware of the book’s materiality as something that literally stands between them. When their voices become one for a moment, exactly one page before the axis of the chiasmic space, they feel “something wide which feels close. / Open but feels closed. Lying weirdly / across US. Between US. Where we’re / closest, where we touch, where we’re one. / Somehow continuing on separately” (179). The characters could here very well be feeling the book that contains them and comprises their world. What lies between them at this point is one page: a space to be traversed. That this is the closest the two are ever going to get gives a materialist spin to an otherwise classic, idealist story of love and unification. This feedback loop finally poses a corrective to the idea of Only Revolutions’ monumental circularity as perfectly self-enclosed. The potentially infinite expansion of this (r)evolving text makes this book-as-world a “nontotalizable totality.” This is a dynamic whole that is not completed or given, yet at the same time without remainder: “Nothing is lacking in the world: the world is the totality, and the totality completes itself as the open, as the nontotalization of the open” (1997, 152). As a non-totalizable totality, Only Revolutions is “open[,] but feels closed” (SH 179). There is no “outside the book,” the book is a world whose here is not opposed to a there but articulates all possible beings-there (Nancy 1997, 78). The circle is never conclusively closed, because world-forming is never finished: it is a process in expansion.

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Conclusion If the world is a book, every book is the world . . . there is no longer a limit of reference. The world and the book eternally and infinitely send back their reflected images. —Blanchot, The Book to Come As I set out, under the influence of (intersections between) globalization and digitalization, our world is paradoxically both smaller and larger than ever, and literary theorists today are concerned with different scales of representation, from the national (the United States) to the global or even planetary. In the face of recent materialist and feminist concepts of autre-mondialisation (otherworlding), which emphasize “world” as something we (re)make (Haraway 2008) and of discussions of the planetary in world literature (Spivak 2003; Rapaport 2011), I considered alternatives to “world” that stress the planet as a nontotalizing system both evolving and expanding, marked by relationality. I argued that when stressing its own material properties, the book-bound novel has a unique way of working through these reflections. Works like The Atlas and Only Revolutions perform the vast unrepresentability of the globe and the lack of an outside position, as well as reflecting on scale variances between the national and the global. They do this by drawing attention to the book’s print materiality, making readers and characters experience the book as a space that is self-enclosed and simultaneously exceeds all representations. Therefore, I have analyzed them as “non-totalizable totalities” (2007, 58) in Nancy’s sense: entities at once both finite and infinite in their diffractions. Both The Atlas and Only Revolutions present the reader with characters’ attempts at escape through digressive movement and narration in a world without a beyond. I have argued that the lack of “outside” that Nancy signals coincides with a shift from transcendence to immanence, and from idealism to materialism. Becoming “worldly” has to do with matter, with relationality (Nancy 2007; Haraway 2008). Therefore, I stated, the historical moment of late globalization coincides with a shift to bookishness. Being symmetrical structures with shifting centers, The Atlas and Only Revolutions present a world in flux. The characters inhabiting these book-spaces wander around without the promise of transcending their material confinements. As I have shown, the worlds that Vollmann and Danielewski project are highly unstable: the contained and the container, world and book, constantly bleed

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into one another. Both novels imply themselves in an American mythology of the global, but also subtend this mythology by problematizing it. They exploit familiar tropes like the American Dream, dreams of rebirth through traveling, and rootlesness. They subvert these cultural archetypes by revealing how “the American” is framed by traditions and myths that tie it to its own geographical and national context. Rather than propagating freedom or autonomy, these characters fail at “rewriting” the self through travel. Instead, Only Revolutions and The Atlas insist on the importance of perspectivism and scale as determinate for any worldview. In both cases, the book has mastery over its owner, the traveling narrator, instead of the other way around. By foregrounding the inescapability of a limited, subjective perspective on the world, Danielewski’s and Vollmann’s acts of world-forming go against the idea of the globe as an already totalized entity available to the panoptic gaze of a viewer. We are reminded of the impossibility of attaining an objective view of a world that we, as observers, are ourselves part of. The book becomes at once a space to escape in and space that is impossible to escape from. This paradoxical characteristic as both infinitely producing new meanings and readings, and being bound in an absolute sense, I argued, links the book to the world. Danielewski and Vollmann engage in what Rebecca Walkowitz sees as an emergent project for world literature: to express “its worldliness by exploiting, honoring, and contesting the function of print. . . . The digital environment may enable circulation, but writers remain fascinated by constraint” (2016). To make global connections possible, we need literature and art as intermediate forms through which these relations can become imaginable. Book-bound novels can thus constitute an inclusive sphere of reference in which they implicate their readers in innovative ways, thus rethinking our expanding relations to the world and to others on a variety of scales. Thus, I contend, both writers enter into the age-old tradition of conflating the book, text, or medium with the world—a gesture imbued with new meaning in a time when there are digital alternatives to the book on hand.

Notes 1 The phase of late globalization that we are generally thought to inhabit, was inaugurated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Late (or “hypernetworked” or “strong” globalization), according to Christian Moraru, is characterized by a

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“geographical structure of co-presence” and an emphasis on worldly being-inrelation (2011, 34). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have famously diagnosed the late-global situation in terms of a collapse between the (spatial and conceptual) division of the world in an “inside” and an “outside” domain (2000, 187). 2 References to the text will henceforth start with “H” or “S” followed by a page number, to indicate the narrator of the particular citation. 3 At the same time, the author acknowledges that this book could not have been made without the internet (see Pressman 2014, 170–71). 4 These historical events have been collected by the author who placed a call on his “MZD Forums” (http://markzdanielewski.info/onlyrev.htm) in August 2005, for his fans to submit the historical moments they would want to see mentioned in the book to come.

Works cited Apter, Emily, 2003. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso. Arnar, Anna Sigrídur, 2011. The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, The Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 269–422. Austin: The University of Texas Press. Barad, Karen, 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–31. doi:10.1086/345321 Baudrillard, Jean, 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by S. F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Benzon, Kiki, 2007. “Revolution 2: An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski.” Electronic Book Review, March 20. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/ regulated Blanchot, Maurice, 2003. The Book to Come. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Blumenberg, Hans, 1986. Die Lesbarkeit der Welt. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Borges, Jorge-Luís, 1998. “The Library of Babel.” In Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley, 59–63. New York: Viking. Brody, Robert, 1977. “Mario Vargas Llosa and the Totalizing Impulse.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19 (4): 514–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40754511 Carrión, Ulises, 2001. The New Art of Making Books. Nicosia: Aegean Editions.

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de Cesari, Chiara and Rigney, Ann, 2014. “Introduction: Beyond Methodological Nationalism.” In Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Edited by Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney, 1–25. Berlin: De Gruyter. Cottrell, Sophie, 2000. “A Conversation with Mark Danielewski.” Boldtype 3 (12). http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0400/danielewski/interview.html (site discontinued; available through the Internet Archive) Craib, Raymond B., 2000. “Cartography and Power in the Conquest and Creation of New Spain.” Latin America Research Review 35 (1): 7–36. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/2692056 Danielewski, Mark Z., 2006. Only Revolutions. New York: Pantheon. Dimock, Wai Chee, 2008. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Drucker, Johanna, 1995. The Century of Artist’s Books. New York: Granary Books. Drucker, Johanna, 1997. “The Self-Conscious Codex: Artists’ Books and Electronic Media.” SubStance 26 (1.82): 93–112. Eagleton, Terry, 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Emery, Mary Lou, 2012. “Caribbean Modernism: Plantation to Planetary.” In The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Edited by Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough, 48–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 2002. “An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited.” American Historical Review 107 (1): 87–105. doi:10.1086/ahr/107.1.87 Farman, Jason, 2010. “Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Modern Cartography.” New Media Society 12 (6): 869–88. doi:10.1177/1461444809350900 French, Marilyn, 1978. James Joyce’s Ulysses: The Book as World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Goodman, Nelson, 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett. Haraway, Donna, 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna, 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hutcheon, Linda, 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel, 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacEachren, A. M., 1995. How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design. New York: Guilford Press. Moraru, Christian, 2011. Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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McGurl, Mark, 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McGurl, Mark, 2012. “The Posthuman Comedy.” Critical Inquiry 38 (3): 533–53. doi:10.1086/664550 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 1997. The Sense of the World. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc, 2007. The Creation of the World, or Globalization. Translated and with an Introduction by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany : SUNY Press. Oliver, Kelly, 2015. Earth and World: Philosophy after the Apollo Missions. New York: Columbia University Press. Pavel, Thomas G., 1986. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pinder, David, 1996. “Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City.” Environment and Planning A 28 (3): 405–27. doi:10.1068/a280405 Piper, Andrew, 2006. “Rethinking the Print Object: Goethe and the Book of Everything.” PMLA 121 (1): 23–39. doi:10.1632/003081206X96131 Portelli, Alessandro, 1994. The Text and The Voice: Writing, Speaking and Democracy in American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Pressman, Jessica, 2014. Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rapaport, Herman, 2011. The Literary Theory Toolkit: A Compendium of Concepts and Methods. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Sontag, Susan, 2002. Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Picador. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Vandendorpe, Christian, 2009. From Papyrus to Hypertext. Towards the Universal Digital Library. Translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Vollmann, William T., 1996. The Atlas. New York: Viking. Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 2007. “Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World Literature.” Novel 40 (3): 216–39. doi:10.1215/ddnov.040030216 Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 2016. “The Persistence of Books.” World Literature Today 90 (3). https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2016/may/persistence-books-rebecca-lwalkowitz Wood, Dennis and Fells, John, 1992. The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford.

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Books as Archives: An Interview with Ernst van Alphen Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

Based in Leiden, Professor Ernst van Alphen is an internationally renowned scholar of comparative literature whose work straddles the borders between literature, critical theory, and the visual arts. He takes his methods from gender studies, cultural studies, semiotics, and visual analysis, while his research topics range from canon formation and art history to Holocaust studies and trauma theory. His most recent works include Art in Mind (2005), which explores the ways in which art shapes our perception and informs our thinking, and Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in Times of New Media (2014). Staging the Archive shows how an archival principle has informed and transformed different art forms since the 1960s and how this principle has created new artistic possibilities in Western culture. As van Alphen shows, artists have investigated the potential of the archival principle by testing its limits—the limits of the standards set for things to be archived, archival systems, and effects of archiving. In this interview, van Alphen reflects on the potentiality of books as spaces that are not restricted to the (presumably) linear modes of engagement that the novel affords. Yet, van Alphen believes, even or precisely the most radical of experimentations based on the logic of archival principles are bound to established book forms: it is the frame or standard they are set against. KBW: Your research allows us to reconsider artists’ books and book works from the 1960s onwards through the lens of archival principles, which, I feel, is extremely relevant for the study of book presence in a digital age. For instance, in my own research I have considered the ways in which graphic artists and book artists have worked with handwriting to extend the memory of reading and, through that extension, transform reading

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into a visual experience. Looking at the work of Doug Beube and Brian Dettmer, and many of the bibliobjets that Garrett Stewart discusses in our book, it is easy to see the presence of the archive: the book archived as an object on display, a ruin, or a trace of what it once was and how it used to function (for instance, in Dettmer’s work the atlas or the encyclopedia, in Beube’s work the telephone book). At the same time, an archival principle has always been at play in art and artists’ books— the latter perhaps more radically than the former— since both offer an alternative to the gallery and exhibition space as a way of organizing, collecting, and preserving material. What happens to books when they become portable archives (in a variation on Ann Rigney’s notion of the novel as a portable monument)? EvA: Yes, this archival principle seems to me rather important for your book on book presence, especially as it also zooms in on artists’ books and on book works. Books, and this is most evident in art books, artists’ books, and book works, are perhaps not literally filing cabinets but do lend themselves quite attractively for archival orderings. In fact, the book is an archive in a most elementary sense: a collection that is ordered in a certain way. Collections can be deposited in books very well, especially so since books are easily distributed and are portable. KBW: You claim that the book is an archive in a most elementary sense. Regarding the notion of “elementary”, what is your approach to the medium specificity of the book? EvA: Talking about the book . . . the book is a medium and according to the simplest conceptions of medium specificity such specificity concerns material or formal aspects. Yet this is a very limited way of considering medium specificity. Rosalind Krauss has written about this. Medium specificity really only partially implies material and formal qualities, and is for the greater part constituted by conventions and traditions that determine the ways we use these qualities. For instance, it is within the world of reading, and the discipline of literary studies and in other academic disciplines studying texts and books as reading material, that the specificity of the book and of print is, as a matter of course, linear [even though the tabularity of the book prevents genres like the novel from being entirely linear, KBW]. In itself, this linearity is the effect of a cultural tradition—in Middle-Eastern and Asian cultures people tend to read the other way around, or read in entirely different ways. So

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then it already becomes clear that what we find entirely self-evident and natural ways of engaging with the book is always already a tradition, a convention. And conventions indeed make up medium specificity, not the medium itself—whatever that in itself would be. However, when you distance yourself from literary uses of and engagements with the book, you see that many visual artists allow the book to emerge in a different way. For instance, there have been photobooks since the nineteenth century. We are now used to seeing photo exhibitions in museums, but that was not at all the case in the nineteenth century: the book then was the exhibition medium for a photograph. The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam has just acquired the first ever photobook by the first female photographer Anna Atkins (1799–1871): a handwritten botanical book collecting and displaying all kinds of British algae—all 307 of them (1843–53). The interesting thing about this book, and this is what you immediately notice when such a book is put on display in the Rijksmuseum . . . you can only really show a single page! So what they have done is that they have copied a number of pages and pasted them onto the walls of the exhibition room, like wallpaper, with the book on display. KBW: What do you think about this? The book opened up as a space, a space as a book? EvA: The funny thing is, what you see there is a confrontation of two kinds of collections. A museum is also a kind of archive, as it displays collections, but the book is really another way of filing collections. And when you wish to display the latter in the former you have a real problem! As collections, the book and the museum are not in sync. KBW: They are organized in totally different ways, or, perhaps, since they are similarly organized, the book with items collected on different pages, the museum in different rooms, they exclude each other because they are both closed collections. EvA: Precisely. Which is why a literary museum is a really difficult concept. What is interesting about photobooks like those by Anna Atkins is that you are meant to leaf, or walk if you will, through them. You do not need to proceed from cover to cover, left to right. KBW: This reminds me of Hari Kunzru’s novella Memory Palace (2013) which has also been displayed as an exhibition, to walk through. Is the book a catalog for the exhibition, which did not have a linear set-up, or is the exhibition an installation of the book?

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EvA: Yes, this nonlinear engagement with the book can be traced to Stéphane Mallarmé or Julio Cortázar where every reader can create her own course through the work and compose her own version of it, depending on how you read it, in which order. Your mention of Kunzru also reminds me of a great work by Leanne Chapton—which is especially interesting for you: Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (2009). This is the story about a divorced couple, Lenore and Harold, and all that is left of their relationship is the 325 photographed items put on display in an auction catalog. The story is told through the description of these items: what a ruptured love life has left behind; things, ruins. . . . It is a marvelous work that shows you the vibrancy of the genre of the novel today. KBW: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2011) is perhaps comparable in its set-up as it is told on the basis of what is left behind by Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles (1934). Although Tree of Codes is not an archive of Schwarz’s book per se, I believe, but rather a record of how he has read it—a preservation of something dear to him. EvA: Yes. Of course, Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel (1984) and Georges Perec’s wonderful Life a User’s Manual (1978) predate Leanne Chapton’s novel as auction catalog in the way they present a story through words and maps. KBW: Why do we like these works so much, what fascinates us about them? Is it the creativity of telling stories in different ways, the combination of the verbal and visual into a collection? What more can the archive mean for the telling of stories do you think? EvA: I think that in the course of the twentieth century, narrativity has receded to the background while the archive, the ways of organizing associated with archiving that is, has become more and more important. This reminds me of Lev Manovich who has suggested that the paradigmatic has become more prominent, while the syntagmatic has become less prominent. KBW: Do you believe that the interaction and relation with new media makes for new engagements with and materializations of the book? EvA: What makes a book medium specific is decided by habit. We are used to treating the book as a linear medium. But the book, or even print, is not a linear medium. There is no material or technological essence to books or to print.

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KBW: The book is nothing in and of itself. There is no the book? EvA: Well, you could describe the material, but it tells us little. Of course, new media open new possibilities for how to deal with books, and the affordances they give which, until now, have been marginal. KBW: But if you look at Cortázar, or even earlier, a non- or rather multilinear engagement with books was there well before the introduction of the digital . . . EvA: . . . and if we consider the photobook, it was there all along. Atkins’s photobook is the most elementary form of an archive: a collection based on one category to browse through. And there have been encyclopedias and Bibles for much longer, which do not require a linear reading either. KBW: Christian Vandendorpe has introduced the concept of tabularity to explain that printed books have never really been linear in the first place. They are visual media that can be easily traversed, like tableaus to be looked at and walked around, instead of lettered threads. What do you think about the concept of tabularity and how might it relate to the archive? EvA: Tabularity is a reflection of our uses of books, and how reading processes have created books, rather than the other way around. Consider the catalog New Realities that Irma Boom has designed for the Rijksmuseum show on photobooks (June 17–September 17, 2017) with the same title. At first sight, this seems to be a very traditional catalog. A text with photographs, a text to be read from left to right. But then, on closer inspection, there is no relation between the texts and the photographs. Random pictures have been inserted on the pages of the catalog. This is perhaps a creative disruption of tabularity as Boom’s design deliberately prevents oversight—something that the tabular precisely facilitates. And yet, randomness is a quality that could be applied to any photobook. Photobooks always have a certain random ordering. The order of the photobook is that all photographs are part of a collection—but the order of presentation remains open. For Boom’s catalog, its specificity is made up of everything that is an instance of a category and this is indeed how she deals with the photographs. Each photograph is an exemplum of that category. This makes for a tricky reading experience! You have to look for the text that goes with each photograph—there are numbers to help you, but the order is never selfevident. This goes against the idea of a linear reading experience, of going places and getting somewhere. The catalog makes you spin.

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KBW: So Irma Boom’s catalog is like a search-book for children . . . readers have to do something, like they have to while reading the work of Mark Z. Danielewski. This is how medium specificity materializes in our physical engagement with books, then: as ergodic text. EvA: There is nothing essentialist that you can make of medium specificity. KBW: Is medium specificity a moment, then? EvA: No, not so much a moment. It is determined by convention, so medium specificity is historically conditioned, but it is also materially conditioned. All I am saying is that it is not just materially conditioned. KBW: But as you propose, it is use that determines medium specificity. EvA: Hmmm, let me give an example: Irma Boom does not stretch or transgress the limits of the book so much, she is just extremely aware of what a book could be, materially, and what that means for our possible relation with books. She reveals ways of dealing with books that have been forgotten, or that have been rendered marginal—she does not invent new books, she instead respects and explores conventions of book use and translates them into form. She has a much broader and deeper view of the history of the book than most of us do, and therefore she has a very keen sense of its potentialities in the present and the future. KBW: Did photobooks make you aware of such different potentialities? EvA: It really was a coincidence that I discovered the tension between narrativity and the archive as I discovered that artists and writers interested in other ways of organizing a collection or a story almost all reverted to an archival principle. A great example is the work of Christian Boltanski. His installations typically resemble archives, and toy with the idea of an archive, using materials for archiving such as boxes and archive folders. Then, he made an artists’ book for each installation, using the typical means of bureaucratic recording: pen, ink, paper. The books were just as important as the installations as they both constituted an archive of modern life and a meditation on memory and death. KBW: If we can return to the idea of the photobook as a frame through which other possibilities of the book become possible . . . yet surely not all photobooks are alike? EvA: No of course, one cannot generalize that all photobooks are the same, that there is some kind of photobook essence. Rather, the most interesting and radical of photobooks have this potential. KBW: Could you give an example?

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EvA: My example would be a book by the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, Photo Grids (1977). It is a book about grids that consists purely of pictures of grids, nine photographs per page, a pattern repeated page after page. And each photograph contains a grid: a door, a window, that sort of thing. So every picture is a mise en abyme of what the book as a whole seems to be about. Here too, as in Irma Boom’s catalog, or Anna Atkins’s photobook, it does not matter how you proceed—from left to right, or right to left, or staying in the middle. It is a commentary on the trajectories we would normally take through books, and take those trajectories completely for granted. So we can learn something from this book: it broadens our horizon as users of books and makes us aware of the limiting arrangement of most of the books that we read or view. As a grid, the book can become an object or instrument of a different kind. KBW: Yes, conceptual artists like Simon Morris in our book on book presence also release us from the commonplace assumptions we have about books and reading them. But now that you have mentioned the mise en abyme— if the mise en abyme belongs to the grid, and the grid to an archival principle, is there not, after all, a relation to narratives? Are narratives and archives two poles on a continuum rather than two opposites? EvA: Precisely, two poles. There are lots of literary stories featuring mise en abymes that signify the story as a whole. But still, what these photographs do, they make you aware of the materiality of the book, of its material potentiality, not of what a story might mean. KBW: Using the frame of the archive we have talked about other modes of engagement with the book than what have come to be called linear. But what about the linear? Novels still sell! EvA: Of course, the linear remains important. The shift toward the archive is at most a difference in emphasis. It does not mean the book or the novel is about to go extinct. Indeed, I would suggest the following conclusion to our interview: the archival turn that I have tried to outline, the experiments with the book only attest to its standard materialization. The standard stands so long as artists try to work their way out of it, it makes for a necessary contrast. Amsterdam, July 27, 2017

Index Abrams, J. J. 116, 127, 131, 139 n.3 actualization 9, 11–12, 15, 78, 115 Adorno, Theodor W. 3, 200 affect 3, 8, 29, 31, 37, 41, 54, 57, 90, 116–17, 119, 121, 145 affective computerization 53–4 Agel, Jerome 7, 216 Aleatoricism 166, 172, 179 Alexander, Charles 12, 13 algorithms 2, 18, 49, 52, 176, 183, 195, 199, 202, 217 Allen, Woody 205 alphabet alphabetic script 18–19, 211, 212, 217–21 Greek alphabet 212 Alphen, Ernst van 11, 19, 247–53 Althusser, Louis 101 Amazon 45, 71, 196, 199, 202, 208 n.8 Amazon Mechanical Turk/ Turkers 196–9, 202 Kindle 45, 50, 55, 80 analog 29, 75, 84, 97, 100, 128, 135–7, 163, 175, 185 Andrews, Jim 217, 221 n.6 anima (Lyotard) 3 Antheil, George 181 Apple 150, 195, 199, 200, 202 iPad 80 iPhone 60, 65, 200 Apter, Emily 14 Aristotle 37 ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) 198, 202, 203, 208 n.5 Atkins, Anna 249, 251, 253 Augustine of Hippo (Saint) 38, 229 Austen, Jane 119–20 Auster, Paul 220 autobiography 90–2, 94–8, 102, 104 auto-factography (Bajohr) 17, 72, 75, 82, 84

Bacon, Francis 47 Bakhtin, Mikhail 216, 218, 228 Baldwin, Michael 47, 48, 50, 52, 53 Banner, Fiona 54, 56, 57 Barad, Karen 234 Barnes & Noble 71 Barthes, Roland 3, 110, 114, 115, 121 n.2 “The Death of the Author” 110, 115 “From Work to Text” 114–15 Baudrillard, Jean 214, 233, 235 Bayard, Pierre 120, 206 Benenson, Fred 196–201, 206–7 Benjamin, Walter 29, 181 Beube, Doug 7, 9, 16, 50, 60–7, 159 n.1, 169, 248 bibliobjet (Stewart) 16, 44, 54, 248 Biersteker, Thijs 54 Blackwell, Patrick 167 Blanchot, Maurice 228, 242 Bloom, Harold 148 Blumenberg, Hans 229 Blurb (publisher) 71, 75 Boehme, Anne Dorothee 173 Bök, Christian 182–3 Bolaño, Roberto 226 Boltanski, Christian 252 Bolter, Jay David 13 the book as archive 18–19, 247–8, 250–1, 253 artists’ books 7, 10, 63–5, 247–8 as body 33–4, 37–8, 41 death of 28–9, 66, 150 as fetish object 17, 30, 32, 60, 66, 85, 129 as flesh 29, 37–41 paperback 7, 95–6 as world 19, 227–9, 231, 241 world as book 227–8, 236 bookishness (Pressman) 10, 16–17, 45–6, 60–1, 65–6, 85, 128–9, 133, 212, 231, 242

256

Index

book presence as apparition 9, 11, 15 definition of 9 bookwork 51–2, 55, 60–7, 72, 185–6 and melancholy 66 as nostalgia 65–6 Boom, Irma 7, 220, 251–3 Borges, Jorge Luis 157, 229 Borsuk, Amaranth 49 Bouse, Brad 49 brandjacking 178 Braudel, Fernand 240 Britton, Howard 163, 166, 172 Brooks, Peter 97 Brown, Bill 112 Budra, Paul 14 Burnham, Clint 14 Burroughs, William S. 169–70 Butor, Michel 50 Cabell, Mimi 80, 82 CAD (computer assisted design) 202 Calvino, Italo 17, 109–10, 114, 117–18, 121, 183 Cardiff, Janet 48 Carpenter, J. R. 74 Carrión, Ulises 13, 146, 227 Carson, Anne 116 Cartesianism 3, 113, 115 Casanova, Pascale 204 Cayley, John 46 Chapton, Leanne 250 Chaput, Thierry 2 Clark, Robert 163 Clarke, Bruce 13 Clay, Steven 19 codec 50, 55 codex 7, 10, 27, 31, 33, 41, 44, 46, 48–55, 57, 61, 66–7, 90, 100, 110, 198–9, 205–6, 227, 234 Colebrook, Claire 3 Collings, Matthew 172 comparative textual media 1–2, 15, 115 conceptual art 18, 47, 48, 52, 56, 167, 253 conceptual book art 44, 51, 53, 55 conceptual writing 18, 72, 74, 76–8, 163, 179, 188 conceptualist performed reading (Morris) 163, 192

copying

18, 181–4, 189, 196–8. See also photocopying copyright 175, 186, 198 Cortázar, Julio 250–1 crowd-funding 196 crowd-sourcing 169 Cunnell, Howard 185 cut-up technique 168–70, 189 Danielewski, Mark Z. 18–19, 61, 142 n.20, 145–59, 227–8, 231, 236–8, 242–3, 252 The Familiar 18, 145–7, 149, 151–7 House of Leaves 18, 61–2, 132, 142 n.20, 145–6, 148, 152, 154–5, 157 Only Revolutions 19, 146–7, 149, 153, 159, 227–8, 231, 236–8, 240–3 Darwin, Charles 197 Debray, Régis 47, 50 de Cesari, Chiara 231 defamiliarization 4, 19, 61 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 10 DeLillo, Don 30 demediation (Stewart) 44, 61, 63, 150, 169, 211, 212, 219 Derrida, Jacques 10, 36, 106 n.13, 134, 211 Descartes, René. See Cartesianism Dettmer, Brian 7, 9, 16, 60–7, 169, 248 Dickinson, Emily 218–19 digital humanities 1–2, 15 digitalization 229, 242 digitization 28–9, 31–3, 39, 41, 47, 55, 84, 229 Dimock, Wai Chee 226, 240 Dion, Mark 164 distant reading 206 distribution of the sensible (Rancière) 119 DIY 164 Dorst, Doug 116, 127–8, 131, 139 n.3 Douglass, Jeremy 14 Drucker, Johanna 7, 10–11, 13, 227 Duchamp, Marcel 73 Dumas, Alexandre 186 Duncombe, Stephen 104 Dupeyrat, Jérôme 188 Dworkin, Craig 178, 206

Index e-books 56, 116, 145, 147 écriture feminine 8 Ehrenreich, Ben 27 Einstein, Albert 52 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 229 Ellis, Bret Easton 80 embodiment 8, 14, 38, 110, 120 Emerson, Lori 14, 72 emoji 195–207 Emoji Dick 18, 195–207 empirical oblivion 114, 116 empiricism 29, 32, 34, 114. See also new empiricism encyclopedia 28, 50, 52, 62–3, 65–6, 248, 251 Engels, Friedrich 203–4 entropy 135–6 e-poetry 2 Facebook 65, 201 factography (Tret’iakov) 81–2 Farion, Christine 175 Farner, Barbara 19 Faylor, J. Gordon 73, 77 Feldman, Julia Pelta 78 figure (McLuhan) 6–7, 11–12, 211 Fiore, Quentin 7, 216 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 183 Flusser, Vilém 63, 211, 215, 217, 219, 220, 221 n.2 Foer, Jonathan Safran 58 n.1, 61, 116, 218, 250 framing 93–4 Franzen, Jonathan 34–7, 226 Freud, Sigmund 18, 165–78 Fried, Michael 49 Frow, John 91, 93–4, 103, 104 n.1 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 38 Gallagher, Kelly 71 Gauss PDF (publisher) 72–3, 75 Genette, Gérard 94, 139 n.3 genre theory 92, 96, 104 Giffin, Lawrence 79 Ginsberg, Allen 184 Gitelman, Lisa 15, 18, 75, 84 globalization 225, 227, 228, 230, 242 autre-mondialisation (other-worlding) 225, 242

257

late globalization 225, 228–9, 231, 235, 242 mondialisation (see under Nancy, Jean-Luc) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 229 Goffman, Erving 6, 94 Gojowczyk, Hubertus 53 Goldsmith, Kenneth 74, 76, 176, 179, 206 Gombrich, Ernst 5 Goodman, Nelson 231 Goody, Jack 212 Google 81, 200 Google Books 197 Google Maps 74, 235 Google Photo 202 Gordin, Michael 204 Graham, Rodney 186 Grahame-Smith, Seth 119 graphic novels 15, 215 Greenberg, Clement 4, 47, 52 Gross, Lukas 74 ground (McLuhan) 6–8, 11, 211 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 8–9 Gutenberg, Johannes 39, 71 Gysin, Bryon 169 Hale, Joe 185 Hall, Steven 220 Hamilton, Ann 45 Hardt, Michael 244 n.1 Harpold, Terry 14 Harris, Stephanie 13 Havelock, Eric 212, 214 Hayles, N. Katherine 13, 15–17, 42 n.8, 76, 92, 94, 111, 115, 121 n.4 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 5 Hemingway, Ernest 183 hermeneutics 76, 129, 134–8 Hollander, John 148 Huebler, Douglas 76 Huff, Jason 80 immaterial 2–6, 8, 11, 37, 39, 62, 75, 78 immodern 3–4 Information as Material (publisher) 164, 192 Innis, Harold 212, 214 Instagram 201

258 Irigaray, Luce 3 iterative turn (Marczewska)

Index

183–4

Jackson, Alecia 111 Jenkins, Henry 128 Joyce, James 28, 158, 181, 229 Kant, Immanuel 3, 44, 225 Kay, Sarah 39 Keats, John 170–1 Keller, Jean 82, 84 Kendrick, Laura 39 Kerouac, Jack 74, 179, 181, 184–6, 234 Kickstarter.com 196, 199, 208 n.8 Kirschenbaum, Matthew 13, 75, 201 Kittler, Friedrich 63 Klinkenborg, Verlyn 33–5 Kraus, Karl 35 Krauss, Nicole 220 Krauss, Rosalind 248 Kristeva, Julia 3 Kunzru, Hari 212–17, 220, 249–50 Lacan, Jacques 166, 178 Lanham, Richard A. 13 Latham, John 50–2 late print age 1 Lauretis, Tessa de 117 Lejeune, Philippe 95 letter 31, 36, 39, 101–4, 134–5 Levine, Sherrie 189 LeWitt, Sol 165, 192, 253 linearity 10–11, 19, 66, 215–7, 219, 233, 238, 247–51, 253 linguistic turn 8, 110 literature experimental 18, 61–2, 72–3, 77, 84, 186, 188, 216, 236 generative literature 74–5, 76–8, 84 Liu, Alan 13 logos 36, 38 Luke (artist) 100, 101, 103–4 Lulu.com 71, 73–8, 80, 83, 84, 85, 196, 199 Lyotard, Jean-François 2–6, 8 McCarthy, Tom 220 McGurl, Mark 226 McLaughlin, Stephen 72, 77–9

McLuhan, Marshall 4, 6, 7, 11, 27, 211, 212, 214, 216, 220 Gutenberg Galaxy 6–7 The Medium Is the Massage 7, 216 Mailer, Norman 58 n.4, 183 Malabou, Catherine 212, 216 Mallarmé, Stéphane 11, 28, 229, 250 Marczewska, Kaja 183 Marks, Laura 118 Martin, Bianca 97–8 Marx, Karl 203–4 Massumi, Brian 3 materiality of the book 96 dematerialization 34, 54–5, 120–1 material turn 17, 111–12, 114, 119 of reading Matisse, Henri 47 Mazzei, Liza 111 media (see also new media) digital media 2, 4, 9, 12, 27, 37, 65, 98–100, 135–7, 237 intermediality 2, 14 media archaeology 14, 212, 221 media convergence 17, 47 mediation. See demediation, remediation Megert, Christian 53 Melgard, Holly 72, 83–4 Melville, Herman 158, 195–201, 203, 205, 207 Moby-Dick 196–8, 200, 205–6 memoir 91, 95, 103 memoir boom 91, 95 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 40 Messina, Antonello de 48 metafiction 110 metaphysics of presence 36 Miller, Daniel 5–6, 112–13, 118 Miller, George Bures 48–9 Mitchell, David 226 Mitchell, W. J. T. 201 modernism 4, 14, 47, 52, 181 Moretti, Nanni 189 Morris, Adelaide 13 Morris, Simon 18, 206, 253 Pigeon Reader 164, 186, 189, 191 Re-Writing Freud 164, 175–8

Index The Royal Road to the Unconscious 18, 164–6, 175, 177 thinkership 185 undesigning 177, 185 Mullaney, Thomas 203 Nabokov, Vladimir 233 Nancy, Jean-Luc 218–19, 227–30, 232, 235, 242 exscription 218–19 mondialisation 229–30 Neef, Sonja 220 Negri, Antonio 244 n.1 Newell, Laurie Britton 214–16, 220 new empiricism 114 new materialism 8, 15, 112–15, 121, 134, 137 new media 4, 11, 13–16, 30–1, 177, 183, 250–1 Ngai, Sianne 76 Nolan, Christopher 220 Obrist, Hans Ulrich 74, 86 n.4 OCR (optical character recognition) Odin, Jaishree K. 14 O’Keefe, Deborah 119 Oliver, Kelly 225, 241 Olsen, Bjørnar 112 Ong, Walter 212, 214, 221 n.2 oral culture 10, 200, 203, 213–15, 217, 220

202

Paik, Nam June 64 painting 47–50, 52–3 paratext 234 Pavel, Thomas 231 Pavic, Milorad 250 PDF 73–6, 78, 80, 84 Perec, Georges 186–7, 191, 233, 250 performativity 17, 111, 119, 192, 234 Perloff, Marjorie 176 phenomenology 40, 53 photocopying 72, 91, 93–4, 96–8, 100–1, 169 Picasso, Pablo 47, 168 Piper, Andrew 15 the planetary 226, 227, 230, 242 plasticity (Malabou) 212, 216, 218, 220, 221 Plate, Liedeke 17, 129, 130, 134, 137

259

Plato 38 Plutarch 130–1, 133, 140 n.12, 141 n.13, 197 Poe, Edgar Allan 51 Poletti, Anna 17, 85 Portela, Manuel 14 postmodernism 2–4, 110, 233, 235 poststructuralism 110 Poulet, Georges 53 Pound, Ezra 67 Pressman, Jessica 9, 14, 15, 16, 45, 85, 115, 128, 132, 139 n.2. See also bookishness Price, Leah 15 Prince, Richard 186 print on demand (POD) 17, 71–8, 80, 81–5 Project Gutenberg 147, 198, 199, 208 n.5 Proust, Marcel 28 Punday, Daniel 14 Pynchon, Thomas 158 Radstone, Susannah 97 Radway, Janice 119 Rak, Julie 95 Raley, Rita 199 Rancière, Jacques 119 Rauschenberg, Robert 82 reader-response theory 110 reading as performance 115, 119, 121, 192, 238 reality boom 92 remediation 91, 94, 97–100, 169 Rigney, Ann 231, 248 Rilke, Rainer Maria 157 Roach, John 50–1, 54 robopoetics (Bök) 182 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 238 Ruppersberg, Allen 47, 48, 52 Ruscha, Ed 64, 166–8, 171–2, 187–8 Royal Road Test 166–8 Saint Jerome 48 St. Pierre, Elizabeth 111, 113–14 Salazar, Ligaya 214–16, 220 Salinger, J. D. 186 Samson, Ian 32 scale 226–7, 229, 231, 240–3 Schnapp, Jeffrey 216

260

Index

Schulz, Bruno 61, 218, 250 Sebald, W. G. 181 selfie 97–100 self-publication 35, 196, 199 sensation (Lyotard) 3–4 senses impoverishment of the 17, 111 multisensory experience 17, 111, 116, 118, 121 proximal senses 116, 118, 121 sense experience 111 sensibility 3, 4, 6 Shakespeare, William 181, 197, 229 Shannon, Claude 129, 135, 137 Siegert, Bernhard 129, 134–5, 137 Sifuentes, Zachary 212, 218–20 signiconic (Danielewski) 18, 145, 148 Sini, Carlo 217–9 skeuomorph 45–6, 54–55 smartphones 200, 203 Socrates 36 Sontag, Susan 122 n.10, 225 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 226 Starre, Alexander 15, 58 n.1 Stefans, Brian Kim 13 Stein, Gertrude 76, 181 Sterne, Jonathan 214 Stewart, Garrett 16, 61–3, 150, 248 Stoicheff, Peter 13 Strachey, James 18 stuplimity (Ngai) 76, 78–9 Sturrock, John 187 the sublime 3, 5, 76, 225 Swiss, Thomas 13 Sylvester, David 165 tabularity (Vandendorpe) 9–11, 233, 236, 248, 251 tactility 90, 94, 145. See also touch Tartar, Helen 19 Taylor, Andrew 13 text hypertext 2, 14, 39 technotexts (Hayles) 17 textual fallacy 120–21 and work 114–15 things agency of 113 humility of 118

Thompson, Hunter S. 183 Thurston, Nick 185, 192 touch 3–4, 8, 12, 29, 31, 39–40, 116, 231 touchscreen 31, 39–40, 176 TPS (Toyota Production System) 203 transmediality 47–8, 92, 128–9, 131, 138 Traumawien (publisher) 73–5, 77 Tret’iakov, Sergei 81–2 Trettien, Whitney Anne 72, 74 Troll Thread 73–5, 77, 86 n.5 Twain, Mark 181 Twitter 65, 80, 128, 136, 201 Tzara, Tristan 169–70 Unicode 200, 202–3 Updike, John 27 Vandendorpe, Christian 9–11, 233, 251. See also tabularity Vargas Llosa, Mario 229 Vollmann, William T. 19, 227–8, 231, 232–7, 239, 241–3 Walkowitz, Rebecca 238, 243 Walter, Maïwenn 188 Warhol, Andy 182 Weichbrodt, Gregor 72, 74, 78–9 Whitehead, Alfred North 12 Wikipedia 78–9 Wilde, Oscar 47 Williams, Mason 167–8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 82, 191 world literature 203–4, 226, 242–3 writing analog writing 217 conceptual writing 18, 72, 74, 76–7, 179, 188, 206 embryo writing 217–8 handwriting 104, 220, 247 rewriting 176, 189, 219 uncreative writing (Goldsmith) 76, 206 Yamamoto, Yohji 183 Yamashita, Karen Tei 226 Yearous-Algozin, Joey 72, 77, 80, 82 zines 17, 85, 90–2, 96–8, 101–4

Plate 1 Brian Dettmer, Tower 58 (Britannica), 2012. Hardcover books, acrylic varnish. 89½" × 15" × 15". Courtesy the artist and P•P•O•W, New York. In 2012 the Encyclopedia Britannica announced that its 2010 edition would be the last to be available in print. In this work, a full series of Encyclopedia Britannica volumes printed in 1958 merge together one page at a time to form a large totemic tower. The work stands as a monument to the physicality of a book. It becomes an unorthodox preservation while also offering a presentation of the content as a relic from a different culture in a different era; not unlike objects found in a natural history or anthropology museum. The reference books take on a new role as they are admired for their cultural and historical significance but become functionally neutered as we move our personal and cultural records into the digital realm.

Plate 2 Brian Dettmer, Lost Worlds, 2016. Hardcover book, acrylic varnish. 8¼" × 6⅛" × 1¼". Courtesy of the artist and P•P•O•W, New York. Lost Worlds is derived from the 1941 publication, Lost Worlds: The Romance of Archaeology by Anne Terry White. This work is part of my Fragment series. The series consists of several whittled down history and archaeology books. They suggest calcified fragments or broken bits found from an ancient site of ruins. The artwork becomes an artifact, a preservation created through destruction. Lost Worlds are found within. Fractured images and text become poetic, original intentions destroyed to take on new interpretations and new meanings. Texts on ancient events echo events of today. Eerie revelations and new interpretations squeeze out from the pages. “Statues had stood in the desert shouting”, “the Labyrinth…the city they forgot”, “towers that were the wonder of the world.”

Plate 3 Brian Dettmer, New Funk Standards, 2017. Hardcover book, acrylic varnish. 12¾" × 12" × 5¾". Courtesy of the artist and P•P•O•W, New York. New Funk Standards is a freestanding sculpture derived from a single copy of the Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary of the English Language published in 1940. The piece’s title is intentionally musical, to suggest the swing, big band and jazz standards popular in the 1940s. The origin of the word “funk” dates back to the Flemish word “fonck” meaning a disturbance or agitation, but associations to 1960’s and 70’s funk music and art are unavoidable and appropriate as well. The book is opened to the center and pulled back on itself, revealing the middle of the book on both sides. Once the solid form is sealed, a careful excavation into the surface reveals the inner architecture of the information’s infrastructure. Memory is revealed as a broken narrative. Value is placed on the impact of a form or a random, fleeting moment. We are pulled into the styles and perspectives of the pre-digital era but also into a world where there was one definition, one recorded history, and an authorized consensus on what was a fact. We have been freed from these frozen forms and perspectives and we now float around weightless without context or structure. The singular, solid voice has been updated and replaced by a formless cloud of personally modified and constantly changing data designed to present “facts” into whatever flavor we seek. The truth is now in a funk.

Plate 4 Brian Dettmer, Tower of Babble, 2011. Paperback books, acrylic varnish. 28" × 10½" × 10½". Courtesy of the artist and P•P•O•W, New York. In Tower of Babble, 2011 dozens of fiction paperback books are stacked and arranged to suggest the double helix of a DNA strand. The geometric structure mimics a spiral staircase, both rising up and breaking down. The surface of the books decomposes into bits and bytes of single words and short phrases. Each word becomes a block or pixel in the staircase, creating a new relationship to the assumed linear strands of text found in a standard narrative. Concrete poetry and new stories run in infinite directions. The movement of text carved into the pages suggests a digital decay; gravity erodes through the stairs as if the weight of research and reading begin to reveal the basic elements behind the construction of these stories. Each word takes on an equal value. The strand could be endless and this geometric erosion is just the tip of the iceberg. Continuous pressure could lead to erasure but this piece stands in a frozen middle ground, both exposing and eradicating the moment of the written word- the moment that words lose the ties they have to their intended meaning.

Plate 5 Doug Beube, Border Crossing: In the War Room, 2006. Altered atlas, thread, zippers, piping, meal, wire. 19" × 22" × 5". Courtesy of the artist. The pages of an atlas are cut into equal halves and aluminum zippers are stitched into them. A number of maps representing a variety of countries are connected using additional zippers on each end of the pages. The colorful pages with relief views of land formations and bodies of water with abstract markings can be fastened or re-connected in numerous combinations. I am expanding the notion of the versatile codex, which traditionally has a fixed number of pages bound together with a common spine. A system of using zippers is endless; pages can be added, deleted or interchanged at will. The pages can be viewed on a single plain or they can be constructed as prisms and other shapes. By exaggerating the flat space into peaks and valleys and geographical borders that represent these alterations, they become malleable. The inspiration to construct Border Crossing in a digital age is based upon computer software programs, which uses the technology of “cutting” and “pasting,” transforming a predetermined alignment of information to be variable.

Plate 6 Doug Beube, Disconnecting the Reality of Old Glory, 2012. Altered books, collage, sculpture, acrylic, ink, thread, paper, zippers. 12½" × 30" × 2". Courtesy of the artist. In all, I search for words in the texts of the original books, Old Glory: An American Voyage by Jonathan Raban and Language: A Modern Synthesis by Joshua Whatmough, that creates broken sentences or a concrete poem. The pages that unfold with zippers attached to them is from the book, The Gilded Dinosaur, by Mark Jaffee. The piece itself incorporates my interests in mixed media, collage, sculpture, drawing, written text, and cut paper, all stitched together with colored zippers that lend the object its great flexibility. The composite portrait both figuratively and literally unfolds. Thus the book can be read as either a flat or three-dimensional piece of artwork. When all the pages are zipped the book can stand upright and be read from any direction. When turned on its side with all the pages zipped, a concertina or accordion configuration is apparent. I alter the pages individually, outlining selected words from the text in a manner inspired by the iconic artists’ book, A Humument, in which Tom Phillips painted graphic lines in various colors around the original text. Similarly, my pages are filled with inked ellipses, overtop of which I penciled in an outline which has been blended into the paper to create a gradation of tones. The elliptical shapes reference musical notes or speech balloons, a metaphor filled with the possibility of giving birth to sound and imagery. The pencil drawings contain shapes inspired by the DNA model. Within these ellipses, wave-like lines suggest the potential birth of language or lyrics. On every page, “islands” of selected words are connected by dark lines that run like rivers meandering through a forest of text. Where the disparate words from various cropped pages meet, the reader can discern a concrete poem. The dyed zippers allow the reader to know the history of the actions taken if pages are reconfigured, just as in the software program Photoshop, in which the history of cutting and pasting is recorded. Like the elliptical shapes on the pages, the ovals cut into the covers refer to musical notes. They also represent audio speakers that are seen, rather than listened to, as an endless loop. In their actual silence, their potential to produce sound, music or the spoken word is implicit.

Plate 7 Doug Beube, Fallen Borders, 2015. Atlas, collage. 12½" × 11¾" × 11½". Courtesy of the artist. Fallen Borders alludes to the political and arbitrary reorganizing of countries, the confusion and the un/reliability of knowing where boundaries begin and end. Maps are no longer definitive. Even with GPS technologies allowing us to pinpoint a location it’s still chaotic and questionable if we will find our destination.

Plate 8 Doug Beube, Cut Shortcomings, 2015. Hardcover book. 9½" × 7¾" × ⅝". Courtesy of the artist. “Shortcomings” is the original title of the graphic novel by cartoonist Adrian Tomine. It was published by Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal, Canada in 2007. The genre of this art form with seven to nine cells per page, in a gridded format, is drawn in black and white with “speech bubbles” floating overhead the characters in the book. Cut Shortcomings is the removal and outlining of the drawings and speech bubbles using an a surgical knife. The recto/verso sides are almost identical in cell structure, with some variation. Regardless, on one side the viewer can trace the original image and on the opposite side sees the same image but in an arbitrary framework. Reducing the content to line drawings, the pages become veiled layers, a dissected essence of the story the brain comprehends as both linear and abstract. Between the two, narrative and abstraction, invites the viewer to literally read between the lines and pages. Along with the meticulously cut windows are forty-eight clear acrylic boxes in a 16" × 20" × 2" frame. Each box holds all of the detritus, cut parts or redacted bits removed from the graphic novel. The chaotic collection of puzzle-like fragments in the boxes corresponds to the respective layered pages. Repurposing the incisions suggests that someone, who is equally as obsessive as the artist to remove the bits, might replace them to their original site, like a jigsaw puzzle or interactive digital format. Firstly, the displacement then secondly, the replacement of bits completes the cyclical actions. The unending conversation, a repurposing on top of repurposing, potentially a collaboration between the artist and someone else; the artwork is a verb rather than a noun.