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 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 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 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 ImmateriauxLyotard 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 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 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 o ur 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 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 three-dimensional, 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 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 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 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 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), preci sely 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 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.
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 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 award-winning 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 book-bound to digital information.
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 present-day 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 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 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.
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? 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.
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.
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 Media-specific 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.
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 Self-Reflexive 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.
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.