Book Presence in a Digital Age

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Kári Driscoll, Jessica Pressman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501321191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Contrary to the apocalyptic pronouncements of paper media's imminent demise in the digital age, there has been a veritable surge of creative reimaginings of books as bearers of the literary. From typographic experiments (Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts ) to accordion books (Anne Carson's Nox ), from cut ups (Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes ) to collages (Graham Rawle's Woman's World ), from erasures (Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow ) to mixups (Simon Morris's The Interpretations of Dreams ), print literature has gone through anything but a slow, inevitable death. In fact, it has re-invented itself materially. Starting from this idea of media plurality, Book Presence in a Digital Age explores the resilience of print literatures, book art, and zines in the late age of print from a contemporary perspective, while incorporating longer-term views on media archeology and media change. Even as it focuses on the materiality of books and literary writing in the present, Book Presence also takes into consideration earlier 20th-century "moments" of media transition, developing the concepts of presence and materiality as analytical tools to perform literary criticism in a digital age. Bringing together leading scholars, artists, and publishers, Book Presence in a Digital Age offers a variety of perspectives on the past, present, and future of the book as medium, the complex relationship of materiality to virtuality, and of the analog to the digital.

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 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 discu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Book Presence: An Introductory Exploration Kiene Brillenburg Wurth
• Part 1 Theory and Overview
• Part 2 Media Changes and Materiality
• Part 3 Conceptual Possibilities of the Book
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright