It’s Just a Book - A Problematic Gestalt

- the titanic was built by professionals,

the ark by amateurs - anon -

I’ve been fascinated by deluge myths since I read Fingerprints of the Gods with all of it’s glorious weirdness mixed in amongst some equally wonderful history. The above quote just made me chuckle, and it seems a lot more good humoured than all the physics message boards online trying to refute thousands of years of theology by demonstrating the tensile strength of ancient building materials. Maybe hearing it’s what brought metaphors to mind.

In Metaphors We Live By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson attempt, in one chapter, to pick apart our knowledge of causation, a conception many theorists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists would consider to be a fundamental building block of meaning - that effects have a cause, and that the latter precedes the former. This knowledge is not uniquely human, any animal we would recognise as intelligent has grasped some variation of “if A then B,” but it does seem to be logically elemental to the way we think; we need such a concept in order to understand our bodies and physical interactions with the world, our sense of time, and our social being, as well as the millions of subsections of these broad divisions. But, what seems atomic, in the ancient Greek sense of indivisible, to our cognition Lakoff and Johnson show to be made up of at least one of a number of smaller parts, of which they list 12 (including knowledge that a change of state is physical; that an agent has a goal of changing some state in the patient; that the agent knows how they will carry out this goal; that the change in the patient is perceptible; and the agent monitors the change in the patient through sensory perception - p70).

We experience these further divisions of causation (which are themselves produced through acquiring knowledge of ourselves and our world during gestation and our subsequent ontogeny, when we practice being us, when we see what we can do with the minds and bodies we've been given), we experience these as a gestalt - “[t]hey recur together over and over in action after action as we go through our daily lives…[T]he complex of properties occurring together is more basic to our experience than their separate occurrence” (Lakoff 71).

That our thought comes in bundles of information drawn from all over our development seems, in hindsight, not that surprising. We never understand things in isolation, we have an experience, we form an inkling of how that experience functioned, we have another experience, and any similarities or crossovers between the two events reinforce, while any dissimilarities or irregularities remain unsupported, and if never repeated will fade away entirely. In this way the common experiences of the world are cumulatively built up into apparent ‘rules’ such as causation, but they are actually useful composites to which we can refer, and which actually intersect with numerous other rules at multiple points, mutually reinforcing one another's elements as experiences reinforce perceptions.

But it’s not just concepts such as causation which function as composites which we experience more regularly than their individual parts in isolation. Objects, or rather artifacts, and let's take the example of bound books, also function as gestalts.

Printed work has come to seem like a fundamental way of presenting information: we receive a book, it is a thing. But the digitisation of texts reveals the book’s assumed gestalt nature in our culture; books are form, they are function, they are typography, paper, and bounded space, they represent printing history, reading history, tactile and haptic development, they stand for elitism, intellectualism, democracy, and accessibility.

This is obvious, of course, book history has long studied all of these aspects of the artifact, and many more. But for most of us, all of us when we’re not studying them in such a way, they remain ‘just books,’ a functional gestalt which frequently, if not mostly, seems fundamental.

Lakoff and Johnson argue that when we have an experience we attempt to attach a gestalt to that event in order to ascertain how we should act. For instance

“being in a conversation is a structured experience. As we experience a conversation, we are automatically and unconsciously classifying our experience in terms of the natural dimensions of the CONVERSATION gestalt: Who’s participating? Whose turn is it?...What stage are we at? And so on. It is in terms of imposing the CONVERSATION gestalt on what is happening that we experience the talking and listening that we engage in as a particular kind of experience, namely, a conversation. When we perceive dimensions of our experience [of an exchange] as fitting the WAR gestalt in addition [i.e. the conversation feels combative with ground to be won or lost, etc.], we become aware that we are participating in another kind of experience, namely, an argument. It is by this means that we classify particular experiences, and we need to classify our experiences in order to comprehend, so that we will know what to do” (Lakoff pp82-83)

Digital reading operates similarly. We have a default gestalt for bound-book reading that has emerged out of ontogenetic experience in a print-led reading environment. We are initially forced to apply that paradigm to reading on digital devices, but electronic reading is capable of interactions which don’t fit in with our p-book experience and we must suddenly use a history of interacting with computing and televisual media in order to modify our reading practices. The READING gestalt, in Lakoff and Johnson's terms, is being modified by its interactions with the COMPUTING and TELEVISUAL MEDIA gestalts; we must apply these frameworks in order to understand how we should interact with digital reading spaces.

Digitisation, like any disruptive agent, forces us, and at unexpected moments, to confront the unfamiliar constituent parts of our composite forms. When a digital book "doesn't feel right" we are reminded of how a bound book's form functions. When an electronic text is reproduced and pirated and sent across the world in a second we are reminded of print's legal history, its fixedness in space, its immutability, its scarcity. When you read materials which would otherwise would have been unavailable, when you see a first time author able to publicise their work to an ideal audience in 50 countries, when you can look up a word or reference that you'd never normally have made the effort to, then things start to seem different. Do we have the right gestalt? Or rather is the default always correct?

I think this is how change occurs, when we are forced to see the item for what it is, not what it has become. But we are also led to see what functions well and why, what parts of the metaphorical 'whole' we need to keep at all costs. Disruption is good.

Best

_m

Evolving Books - it’s not the words, it’s the bodies.

Phibalosoma Phyllinum - Christian Meyn

- the cleat-gouged trunk of the telephone pole holding its insulators against the sky...he used to love to climb the poles. to shinny up from a friend's shoulders until the ladder of spikes came to your hands, to get up to where you could hear the wires sing. their song was a terrifying motionless whisper. it always tempted you to fall, to let the hard spikes in your palms go and feel the space on your back - john updike -

Hi to anyone visiting from Teleread. The following is a post which should be going up over there anytime now, and it's a a rewrite of this post from the end of last year. There's a bit more literary theory to the original post, so please take a look around if you think that might interest you. Hopefully there'll be some more dual posting in the future, the original mess of thoughts probably going up here first before the nice neat copy heads to Paul and David (many thanks to them for putting up with my drafting...).

I'm currently finishing up Merlin Donald's Origins of the Modern Mind, so hopefully I'll be able to put together some thoughts about the possible impact of his thesis on the digital reading debate, plus the Apple Tablet/iSlate/iApocrypha is due any day now...

Anyways, here's the Teleread piece.

Best

_m

“[T]he book is already ‘dead’ (or superseded) if by ‘alive’ you mean that the institution in question is essential to our continued commerce in ideas” - Stuart Moulthrop, ‘You Say You Want A Revolution?’

As a book technology researcher in an English department I often have to talk to roomfuls of archivists, literary enthusiasts, and downright bibliophiles about the joys of digitisation. It can be a tough sell. If I’m feeling brave I like to kick off with that great quote above and get ready to duck. You see I don’t think they always understand that I’m on their side; when I say that books are no longer essential I don’t mean we should go all Fahrenheit 451. No, I mean that when we do hold on to them, and for dear life, we’ll be doing it because we care, not because we have to. This seems to be much better than assuming that they’ll always be around, and that they’ll always be our most effective tool for receiving information. But perhaps I should just be grateful that people still care about books. As soon as that passion can be at least partially turned from pages to screens with the right device then we’ll suddenly have a lot of Telereaders in our midst…

In the meantime people’s continuing obsession with bookish bodies fascinates me. Reading Henry Plotkin’s Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge (Amazon link) I realised that if bodies are the result of evolution, then evolutionary theory might be a useful way to interrogate books. In this piece I’d like to begin to look at books as evolved creatures and suggest that they don’t just hold knowledge, they are knowledge.

First let’s consider a key aspect of Plotkin’s book: his attempt to move the debate as to what constitutes ‘knowledge,’ from philosophy to biology. Knowledge, as we predominantly (or ‘common-sensically’ as Plotkin would have it) envision it, can be described as a state in the brain matching a state in the world. For instance I ‘know’ my way to work, I’m able to find my way there because I know where the building which houses me for the best part of my Saturday exists in relation to the warmth of my bed; I have a knowledge of the route, a mental map which conforms to a reality in the world. Plotkin takes this conception of knowledge, a matching of brain states to world states, and extends it to the evolution of bodies, because bodies conform to the world in much the same way. When a stick insect reaches maturity it resembles a stick, and this camouflage represents a genetic ‘knowledge’: a state in the insect (looking like a stick) maps onto a state of the world (the existence of sticks in the environment in which the insect lives). Our eyes, our opposable thumbs, our ability to develop language and articulate it, any of our adaptations which have been selected by the survival of our ancestors, all of these are forms of knowledge akin to my knowing my way to work: states within matching states without. This notion has something rather appealing about it, that bodies ‘know’ like minds ‘know.’ Every adaptation, for Plotkin, is a knowledge of the environment that produced it. So how, as I always seem to find myself asking, might this apply to books or digital reading?

It’s at this stage that the Universal Darwinism kicks in: I think that books are the products of evolutionary effects. Evolution - to describe it in a post which doesn’t descend into complete tl;dr fodder - requires variations which are able to be tested and replicated. For our stick insect the bugs that came before her were a mix of more or less stick-like insects. The fact that she exists today shows that her ancestors were the most stick-like, because the gene pool of insects generated billions of more or less stick-y forms over time, through various mutations, and those that most resembled sticks, those which were better camouflaged, avoided being eaten and survived to reproduce and pass on some of their stick-like natures to their offspring. Our current stick insect, therefore, is the sum total of the biological knowledge of the world acquired by her ancestors - their bodies found out what sticks looked like by avoiding being eaten, and all so she might resemble one herself.

Artefacts for storing words, too, have varied over time, from clay tablets to Kindles - mutations in form and size, bindings, typography, prices, printing speeds, paper or digital, variations of all possible parameters have been generated. And we are the environment for books, we cause the selection, we the readers are the hungry lizards or birds waiting to eat the badly camouflaged stick insects, and we ensure that our media artefacts become ‘fitter.’ In a twist it is our consumption of books, rather than our leaving them be which ensures the reproduction of their different ‘genes’ (or memes if you will), but otherwise this seems to map quite well. When a book is the right price, when it can fit in your bag and survive the journey, then you’re more likely to buy a book like that again, the form grows fitter as the demand for it rises. But when a book is too expensive it doesn’t get read, the same if it falls apart or the font’s unreadable, if it’s too large or too heavy. If it stays unread because of its physical flaws then that kind of book is far less likely to appear again. It might as well have been eaten.

This view of books would mean that if all adaptations represent knowledge of an environment then books do not just contain knowledge, they are knowledge, manifesting the history of their ancestors’ interactions with the humans which held them. We may feel instinctively uncomfortable in thinking that books somehow possess knowledge, but I’m not trying to say that they are conscious of their acquirements, anymore than stick insects choose to reflect an aspect of the world. A book’s knowledge is directed by evolutionary effects, not by guided learning, but this doesn’t diminish the fact that they are the embodiment of a tumultuous past; in every book there is a fragment of every book that toiled before it. Maybe this is why e-readers can get it so wrong in their competition for the advanced and the exotic - they’ll only ever evolve, they can never be produced at first pass. Bound books are the knowledge of a hard fought struggle, and not to learn from them places our new technologies back with the typographic amoebas.

Epigenerating Text

- he was in the sixth hour of his crying…i thought of taking him to the hospital. But if a doctor who examined the boy thoroughly in his cozy office with paintings on the wall in elaborate gilded frames could find nothing wrong, then what could emergency technicians do, people trained to leap on chests and pound at static hearts? - don delillo -

First off some good news: in regards to my last post I got accepted to the “Material Cultures: Technology, Textuality, and Transmission” conference at Edinburgh University next year. I’m thrilled to be a part of the “Automatic Writing/Automated Reading: Technology and Transmission in the Modernist Period” panels organised by Dr. Eric White and Prof. Laura Marcus, and if the prior years’ lineups are anything to go by then it should be a fantastic event, and its central concerns couldn’t be more relevant to my thesis. Thanks to Eric and Laura for the chance to put something together.

I’m currently reading Henry Plotkin’s Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge, about 100 pages to clear before I head home for Christmas and curl up with Merlin Donald’s sister text Origins of the Modern Mind (Frank Wilson turned me onto Plotkin’s work in The Hand where he drew explicit parallels between Darwin Machines... and Origins..., a book which has been in my ‘to read’ pile for way too long).

Plotkin’s particular brand of ‘Universal Darwinism’ manages to avoid making all of my Dawkins alarm bells ring by avoiding any of that biologist’s recent one-note shrillness (a shame after the undoubted power, use, and persuasiveness of his early work), instead attempting a relatively sensitive reconceptualisation of the debate as to what constitutes ‘knowledge,’ attempting to move it from a philosophical to a biological discourse. I won’t attempt to comment on the merits of his argument before I finish the book, though I suspect he’s far too smart to try and dissociate biology and philosophy entirely, but the heart of his thesis has become apparent and bears repeating.

‘Knowledge,’ as predominantly (or ‘common-sensically’ as Plotkin would have it) envisioned, can be described as a state in the brain matching a state in the world. For instance I’m able to find my way to work because I know where the building which houses me for the best part of my Saturday exists in relation to the warmth of my bed; I have a knowledge of the route, a mental map which conforms to a reality of the world. Plotkin simply and ably strips out the more troubling epistemological and ontological arguments by saying that knowledge doesn’t have to be ‘true,’ it just has to function, to be ‘workable.’ Deleuze and Guattari’s opening from A Thousand Plateaus springs to mind (if a little - typically - problematically): “it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking” (3). There are two types of ‘knowledge’ at work here, we ‘know’ the sun rises (a knowledge which is false yet workable and conforms to a state of experience), and yet we also ‘know’ that the sun appears to rise because of the way in which the earth orbits the sun (we believe there to be state out there to which our brain’s map correlates, a truer ‘knowledge’ perhaps).

Plotkin takes this concept of knowledge, its matching of brain states to world states, and extends it to states of evolved bodies which conform to world states in the same way. When a stick insect reaches maturity it resembles a stick, and its camouflage represents a genetic knowledge of the world: a state in the insect itself maps onto a state of the world. Plotkin asks us to consider knowledge as we might conventionally imagine it as merely a subspecialty of this wider ‘biological knowledge.’ The shape of our hands, our opposable thumbs, our walking gait, our ability to develop language and articulate it, all of these adaptations, like the stick insects’ camouflage, are forms of knowledge akin to my knowing my way to work, states within matching states without.

This notion has something rather appealing about it, that bodies know like minds know, or rather minds know like bodies know to order the processes in the order in which they developed. Every adaptation, then, is knowledge of the environment that produced it. So how, as I always seem to ask myself at the moment, might this apply to books or digital reading?

It’s at this stage that the Universal Darwinism kicks in - I think that books are the products of evolutionary effects. Evolution - to describe it in a blog post which doesn’t descend into complete tl;dr fodder - requires variations which are able to be tested and replicated. For our stick insect her ancestors were a mix of more or less stick-like stick insects. The fact that she exists today shows that her ancestors were the most stick-like, because the gene pool of stick insects generated billions of more or less ‘sticky’ bugs over time, through various mutations, and those that most resembled sticks, were better camouflaged, avoided being eaten and survived to reproduce and pass on their stick-like natures to their offspring. Our current stick insect is the sum total of the knowledge of the world acquired by her ancestors. Artefacts for storing words, too, have varied over time, from clay tablets to Kindles - mutations in form and size, bindings, prices, printing speeds, positioning of marginalia, physicality or ephemerality, variations of all parameters have been generated. And we are the environment for books, we the readers are the selectors, and we ensure that these media artefacts become ‘fitter’ (better able to pass on their memes rather than their genes, but pass them on they do). In a twist it is our consumption of books, rather than our leaving them be which ensures their reproduction, but otherwise this seems to map well. If I get a chance I’d like to return to this idea in another post, because books also seem to place selective pressures upon us, but we can consider interactors and replicators another day.

For now I’m happy with the idea that this would mean, if all adaptations represent knowledge of an environment, that books do not just contain knowledge, but are knowledge, manifesting the history of their ancestor’s interactions with the human’s which held them. We may feel uncomfortable in thinking that books possess knowledge, but this would not be to say that they are conscious of their acquirements, anymore than stick insects choose to reflect the world, or our hands are aware of their conforming to objects which we would like to grip. Books’ knowledge is directed by evolutionary effects, not by guided learning, but this doesn’t diminish the fact that their bodies represent a transcription of a tumultuous past in physical form, that in every book there is every book before it. Maybe this is why digital texts can feel so wrong - bound books are a knowledge of a hard fought struggle, and not to learn from them would place our new technologies back with the typographic amoebas.

I’d like to make another argument for the value of viewing books as defined by evolutionary principles, the primary point of this post I think. Complex multi-cellular organisms, such as humans, are produced by a process of ‘epigenesis.’ In short, we are not just the product of our genes, but also of our development (the nature/nurture binary having been so long collapsed it needs no further explication here):

“Development is not an automatic, pre-ordained unfolding process which, once initiated, proceeds to the completed state of the adult organism. Rather, each individual is, in a real sense, created anew, the unique outcome of an immensely complex series of interactions between the different parts of the genetic constitution of the individual; and also between its genes, its developing parts and its environment” (Plotkin 122)

Paraphrasing Plotkin, our genes dictate a range in which an attribute may develop, setting constraints, whilst the environment of our development dictates where that attribute settles and manifests in the range. For instance my shoe size is 13, but my genes didn’t make them that way. My genes said that my feet could be somewhere between 10s and 15s, and my development, my ‘ontogeny,’ in the womb and in childhood, selected somewhere in this range (to any biologists: forgive my violence to the theory of epigenesis, my intentions are good).

It might well be productive to think of our evolved books in this way. Their genes (memes) are their form and the letters on their pages, both determined by histories of variation and adaptation. A Penguin Modern Classics edition of Ulysses, (undoubtedly a very well adapted animal, ably passing on its memes) appears as a result of the selective pressures on its ancestors: a codex not a scroll, glue-bound not stitched, distinctive front cover art not individualistic, batch produced not hand printed, High Modernist style not genre fiction (maybe ur-genre?), etc. etc. This is the book as adapted organism, the book as embodied knowledge as described above. But it is not the text in its theoretical sense, it is not the individual instance. As has been increasingly appreciated, the text emerges in the environment of being read by a reader, much as we emerge epigenetically in response to living in our world. As readers we take that memetic material which describes the constrained ranges of attributes we designate ‘book,’ and we select, through our reading experience, along those ranges to produce the text, performing the same function as my early life’s selecting from the genetic range to produce my feet.

What could we gain from using such a metaphor? Most importantly, for me, it reminds us that the text is always produced anew by the Reader out of raw bookish materials. But, unlike Barthes' deceased Author, the theory of epigenesis as applied to texts returns an agency to the artist which most of us struggle to believe they ever truly lost. An Author may not be able to transmit meaning, but they, alongside the history of the codex artefact, do set the constraints of the text we are able to produce as Readers, a set of ranges from which we select which can be almost infinitely meaningful(l).

As a metaphor it doesn't offer up any new theory perhaps, but instead distills some of the common concerns surrounding the Reader's production of the text, most importantly the returning of an ambiguous agency to the Author by defining the extent of their abilities, and also reducing an infinite variety of reader responses to selections from within a massive but finite territory. I hope that it also functions as a shorthand for the evolutionary ideas that I outlined before. In understanding the production of text as epigenetic there must first come the conception of books being produced by evolutionary effects, and of books embodying the history of bookish adaptations, something we may want to consider as a form of knowledge. Epigenesis in books, then, also functions as a container for this prior theory.

If you’ll permit me to coin a term I’ll throw my chips in with ‘epimemesis.'

Best

_m

How’d You Like Them Apples?

- the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other:then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life’s not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis - e.e. cummings

Well, it’s been a hectic few weeks, blame my seminar groups for keeping me busy by making me constantly try and write classes that they’ll find entertaining (they’re damn smart, it’s been tough). My favourite challenge this week came after I’d attempted to make a positive statement about Post-structuralism, one that I’d lifted from Catherine Belsey’s great introduction: “It’s not about a radical subjectivism, you can be wrong, you can just never be certain that you’re right.” “But,” came the question within two seconds, “isn’t that you saying something that you’re certain is right?” “Um…yes…” Cue discussion of the irony inherent in the Death of the Author. I love teaching.

I’ve also been trying to come up with a decent abstract to submit to the Material Cultures conference that’s going on next year in Edinburgh. Thought I’d share what I’ve got so far as it crosses over with a lot of the concerns of this blog:

Mark Danielewski’s Kinaesthetics - An Extension of Modernist Haptics in the Digitally Defined Work

The Modernist fascination with manipulating the previously fixed book, enabling it to function as the reflection of a dispersing subjectivity, manifested itself in a proliferation of lexical, typographic, syntactic, and syntagmatic forms. In this respect “The Wasteland”’s quotations, E.E. Cummings’ abuse of the poetic line, and Joyce’s later experiments in style have become totemic. Alongside the challenge instigated by Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, the printed pages on which these works appeared, rather than the closed, visually spare, and linearly progressing objects that a history of codex reading had thus far dictated, suddenly became ruptured spaces of seemingly infinite possibility.

But the codex is an artefact, experienced with the skin as well as the eyes and mind, we are ‘kinaesthetes’. This has resulted in many contemporary writing projects engaging not just with the literary form of script, but also its physicality; as the technology for producing ever more radical textual spaces has emerged the previous limitations imposed on the possibilities for experimental writing by machinic and monetary concerns are brought further to light. The effects of the Modernists’ attempts to negotiate a nullified human transcendence with a shaping of words, therefore, continues to be explored and reinvigorated, and the ‘threat’ of the current trend towards the digitisation of text adds an extra vitality to the task of interrogating the physical - what are the implications of believing that we can look, but cannot touch?

I hope to show that the haptic experience of the codex represents our best chance of understanding materially aware works, particularly those which have emerged at this time of media convergence, where the screen has become as polyphonous as the subject before it. My paper will examine the work of Mark Danielewski as a continuation of the Modernist concern with the effect of the writing space in the age of digitisation, considering his novels as sites of several interrelated yet discontiguous movements - from Modernism to Postmodernism, from a consideration of form on the page to the page beneath the form, from the constraints of off-set printing to the freedom of digital typesetting, and from the (tangible) codex as the standard for receiving script to a new default of incorporeality.

Hopefully the paper will get accepted and I’ll be able to post the whole thing sometime next year. As you can see already, however, the concern is still very much with touch and technology. With the increasing fervour surrounding the, as yet, non-existent Apple tablet the importance of a truly proprioceptive media device occurring in the midst of the multiple discussions reacting to the ‘threat’ of digital incoporeality should not be underestimated.

The iPhone is a stunning thing (this is spoken with the lust of a non-owner), and its launch was responsible for putting, quite frankly, alien technology in people’s pockets. The thought of the same company offering a screen similar in size to an open paper-back book, as thin as a mobile, responsive to multi-touch gestures, net-enabled, mp3- and video-playing, capable of telephony, typing, annotating, sharing, e-reading, etcetera, well, I think that’s reason enough to get a little hot under the collar at the moment. It won’t be perfect, but I have a feeling that truly technology-converged tablets are going to be what we expect of computing over the next five years or so. No longer will you buy a medium, you’ll instead purchase a space which won’t tie you to an ereader, a videoscreen, a computer, a phone. Technology seems at its most appealing when its uses aren’t defined by its form, when the manual is just a list of suggestions.

The laptop currently represents our furthest step towards such a polyphonous space, and I think that a tablet which extended the appeal of both form and function, which made the interface intuitive, transparent, this seems the next logical step. What the burgeoning industry could probably do with is to be hit by a familiar competitor joining the fray, one with a huge amount of leverage and a reputation for innovation…then they need to surpass it utterly and end Apple’s synonymy with mobile media. This isn’t an argument for Apple, but for flexibility of devices being kick-started as soon as possible. The quicker this stuff gets into people’s hands the sooner we can start to really ask the e-book question: is it time to go digital? What better answer to the ‘an iPod for books’ cry than an iPod for books? I can’t imagine buying a Nook without seeing it…

Best

_m

P.s. - I almost forgot, there’s also an appealing eco reason for preferring converged devices - less plastic trinkets cluttering your life: just a tablet, a tv, and a set of decent headphones and you should be all set. That said, I’d much prefer it if its body was recyclable and came with cheaply replaceable parts so I didn’t have to throw it all away come the inevitable upgrade. Madness you say?

Translating to Digital

- people used to make records,
as in a record of the event,
the event of people playing music in a room - ani difranco

Ok, bit of a whirlwind post, I'm off to a translation conference tomorrow morning, and my train's at half 5, so please forgive me the lack of referencing and hyperlinking in this piece, sources are certainly available on request, and I might even get round to it when I get back.

This is, verbatim, what I will be saying tomorrow afternoon. I'm sorry you don't get a handout, but all the quotations are in the text. I've touched on some of these ideas on this blog before, but there's a lot of new content, and I think it reflects the current state of my research pretty well.

Best
_m

- Translating to Digital:
What Changes When Nothing Changes? -

Whenever I say that I’m researching the potential impact of reading digital texts, I always get asked: “so do you think we’re going to stop reading books? Are books going to die out?” I’d like to begin, then, with a quote from Stuart Moulthrop, who says:

“The book is already ‘dead’ (or superseded) if by ‘alive’ you mean that the institution in question is essential to our continued commerce in ideas.”

I very much like that idea, that books are no longer essential. That means that when we do hold on to them, and for dear life, we’ll be doing it because we care, which has to be much better than assuming that they’ll always be around, and that they’ll always be our most effective tool for receiving information. It is in this vein that I would like to ask today why a printed page is so different from its digital counterpart, why so many are so resistant to such change, and why, if we consider this move from page to screen as an act of translation, we might have to rethink the word ‘text’ and its implications, particularly if we delve into the history of our species.

In a short essay from 1932, entitled “The Homeric Versions,” Jorge Luis Borges said of translation, and this is quotation 1, that:

“The model to be imitated is a visible text, not an immeasurable labyrinth of former projects or a submission to the momentary temptation of fluency. Bertrand Russell defines an external object as a circular system radiating possible impressions; the same may be said of a text, given the incalculable repercussions of words. Translations are partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers…To assume that every recombination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draft nine is necessarily inferior to draft H - for there can only be drafts. The concept of the ‘definitive text’ corresponds only to religion or exhaustion”

Over the next twenty minutes I would like to unpick this quote from Borges and take what he says about the act of translation acting as a redrafting and reiterating of always unstable texts, and begin to apply it to the form of translation across media that we are seeing with the increasing digitisation of the book form on computer screens and devices such as the iPhone, the Amazon Kindle, and the SONY Reader.

So what does Borges say first? That translation aims to model a ‘visible text,’ a cohesive object, rather any ‘immeasurable labyrinth of former projects.’

This notion of the original work to be translated being somehow coherent in and of itself, as if no drafting had occurred, and continued to occur, this question plagues translation studies. Exactly what is it that is being translated? The digitisation of written texts, I maintain, is a form of translation because it asks the same question of script, of the written or printed word. What is being translated? As Katherine Hayles states this new formulation of that old question, quotation 2:

“By and large literary critics have been content to see literature as immaterial verbal constructions, relegating to the specialized fields of bibliography, manuscript culture, and book production the rigorous study of the materiality of literary artefacts…It is becoming overwhelmingly clear that we can no longer afford to ignore the material basis of literary production. Materiality of the artefact can no longer be positioned as a subspeciality within literary studies; it must be central, for without it we have little hope of forging a robust and nuanced account of how literature is changing under the impact of information technologies”

As books are scanned or otherwise reproduced for new digital mediums the question of translation, then, becomes a question of embodiment: what does taking, or seeming to take, a text’s body away actually do? This seems, to me, to be at the root of the most commonly heard protest against reading on a computer screen or a dedicated electronic reading device, the but-I-can’t-read-it-on-the-beach/in-bed/in-the-bath argument.

Maybe it’s because we think of texts as implicitly human bodied, that to rob them of such would feel somehow barbaric. Books have chapters, from the Latin for head, caput, whilst pages have feet for their footnotes. The book’s body has a spine, and their contents can have an appendix. Even references to sections being ‘above’ or ‘below’ rather than ‘shallower’ or ‘deeper’ suggest it should be standing on its feet.

This does not, however, seem enough of a reason for why so many people are aghast at the idea of the translation of works to digital simulations. Perhaps, then, it’s to do with the science of touch, the haptics of reading. The shape of the bound book may have come to pass through mere ergonomic coincidence - thin pages for lightness and compactness, as well as the ability to browse, thick covers for protection, these things make sense -, but the continuation of the form is not an accident. When we learn how to read we are informed by the generations of people who have written, read, and researched before us; we learn to read books as both a medium and a message, whether we are conscious of it or not. And we read them as we think we should, as the pinnacle of humanity’s physical expression of thought. As Florian Brody describes it:

“Our conceptions of text and textuality are so closely linked to the physical object of the book that any paradigmatic change in its form seems to threaten the stability of representations of knowledge.”

That a threat to the body of the book should seem akin to a threat to the acquisition of knowledge is unsurprising for two connected reasons: The first, that we sublimate our tools, is well explained by Walter Ong who documents the notion that

“intelligence is relentlessly reflexive, so that even the external tools that it uses to implement its working become ‘internalised’, that is, part of is own reflexive process.”

Or, if that’s too sedate an appraisal, Marshall McLuhan describes the same effect in quotation 3:

“When the perverse ingenuity of man has outered some part of his being in material technology, his entire sense ratio is altered. He is then compelled to behold this fragment of himself ‘closing itself as in steel’. In beholding this new thing, man is compelled to become it.”

Human beings, then, are natural technicians, and in much the same way as our hominid ancestors became ‘at-one’ with the branches which enabled their transit, each swung from liana becoming an extension of a brachiating arm, so we continue to be able to ‘incorporate’, to borrow neurologist Frank Wilson’s apt term, external tools into our being. This is not as alien a concept as we might imagine - a musician being able to express themselves through music which could only be produced by external means is a familiar figure. A book, then, is much the same, a material artefact onto which we project aspects of ourselves, and which we incorporate as part of ourselves.

A bound book has come to represent knowledge and fixed coherence, completed and separated from the world by its covers, a totemic projection of a definitive truth. Espen Aarseth reveals this in a simple thought experiment, quotation 4:

“Imagine a book in which some of the pages appear to be missing, or the print is unreadable every 16 pages, or some of the pages are repeated while an equal number omitted. Even if this copy is the only one we ever see, we automatically assume that it is not supposed to be this way and that a more correct version exists…In short, we prefer the imagined integrity of a metaphysical object to the stable version that we observe”

The bound book has become sublimated as a form, incorporated within us. The codex is now transcendent, a suitable word, perhaps, for the medium’s biblical roots.

The second, and related process goes back further, that our hands and brains are intimately linked. I have far too little time to explore the notion fully here, but consider our early simian ancestors attempting to make the first tools, a hammer say. In order to create a basic hammer a rock must be tied to a sturdy stick, but in order for this to happen a mental image of the future hammer must be in place, i.e. there must be symbolic thought. There is much evidence to suggest that the evolution of tool use coincides with the evolution of mental imaging, of this symbolic thought, and that the use of our hands has long been tied to thought in general. Contemporary research into gestures and pedagogy seems to support the continued impact of such assertions. Scientists in Norway studied a class performing maths problems such as that in quotation 5: 3+2 +8 = BLANK +8. The students must learn to balance the equation by finding the single digit which is equivalent to 3 + 2 in the first half, they must understand the concept of ‘grouping’ - adding adjacent numbers together to produce a balanced sum. In order to teach this act of ‘grouping’ tutors were getting students to draw a little ‘v’ shape with their finger under the 3 and the 2, physically tying them together. Sure enough students understood the concept significantly faster. But the researchers also found, over the course of the study, that it didn’t matter where the students drew the ‘v’, it was the very act of making the gesture which introduced and sublimated the concept.

So what are the implications of these twin assertions, that the mind assimilates external objects it uses frequently, and that hands and brains have always worked in close tandem, what are the implications for our problems of translating to digital, of our worries that we might no longer read our books in the bath?

Perhaps processes which have shaped us for hundreds of thousands of years should not be ignored due to the emergence of new technologies whose R&D time is measured, on average, in months, and only rarely in decades. As such it may seem that we are taking our hands out of reading, removing our ‘tactile observation’, as it were, and introducing a uniquely human kind of blindness. Tales of sudden blindness, of Milton, for instance, or of Nietzsche, of Joyce, or even of Borges himself, for all of their ability to shock us with our own fragilty, hold none of the horror of a true loss of touch, not just a numbness of the hands, but a removal of the skin from our sensation. To touch is never in our control - we touch against our will - always forced to maintain at least a point in pressure with something, hence our fascination with acrobatics, zero-gravity, or the weightlessness of floating in a heavily-salted sea, though none of these represent a true, total loss of touch or else they would become grotesque. Touch is never in our control, but for the most part it is controlled, we might think of pain as excessive touching, or the echo of a misplaced touch. We see the most important aspects of our world with our hands, our skin. No wonder that so many avid readers, so many holders of printed books, feel that they must speak out - do they not subconsciously fear that the new technology might make us, if not paralysed, then haptically blind?

We must not ignore these questions of tactility, indeed they are the vital design questions facing this generation of technology, but I also wonder if these arguments aren’t born of privilege, of cultures who have a rich literary heritage, a diversity of cheaply available physical books, and access to this first generation of digital reading devices. When the price point drops to such a degree that the technology is available in the poorest parts of the world, as the One Laptop Per Child Project is already promoting, and these previously silenced heritages are able to be transmitted alongside the work of the rest of the world, the arguments for holding onto paper technology, at least for day to day use, may well seem strange, or, worse, the product of a decadence which has tainted the West over the last several hundred years. That is not to say that paper books will disappear, but the trend towards digitisation is manifestly real, and in many parts of the world, and for the next generations, digitised reading is going to become the norm with bound books found in a niche we are yet to carve.

What might be the effect of reading works translated across mediums in such an environment, where bound books are no longer essential? Let’s return to the Borges’ quotation and what he says of Bertrand Russell, that

“Russell defines an external object as a circular system radiating possible impressions; the same may be said of a text, given the incalculable repercussions of words.”

When we translate from physical to digital we do not preserve the text, we transfer the script, the raw writing. We need to readjust our idea of what ‘text’ means in light of this movement, and Russell’s external objects seem perfect: ‘systems radiating possible impressions’. If the text, to all intents and purposes, has no body - and I’m not so sure that this is wholly true, though I have no time to discuss Kirschenbaum’s forensic studies, Hayles’ ‘material metaphors,’ or even the ridiculousness of suggesting to people who manufacture computer components for a living, that they are making non-physical media - but if we were to assume a lack of corporeality, and see the script as only a part of the textual experience, then we might begin to see text as nothing save the situation which surrounds it. Why isn’t a scan of a book page the same as a printed version? Because the text is the script combined with our time, our place, space, history, artefact sublimation, our phenomenology, the ontology of the apparatus, and so on, and so on. Text emanates outwards to encompass the artefact’s and the reader’s histories which exist in symbiotic feedback loops constantly affecting one another.

At the most basic level we approach a novel in a bound book with a specific history, including our personal history of the book form, and this frames our reception of that novel. We approach that exact same novel on screen with all of that history, plus our history of computing.

It is the baggage of bound book history that we bring which may cause many to view the translation to digital as somehow ‘unnatural’. In much the same way as we might look at a typical countryside image and think that it is ‘natural’, forgetting the centuries of human landscaping that have often gone into its construction, so have many readers consumed printed books and reported that they appear to model their thoughts accurately. My contention is that, perhaps, they should have asked if their thoughts have in fact been modelled to fit the printed page. As Sergio Cicconi puts it, quotation 6:

“[c]hirographic writing, and, later, typographic writing, [has] strongly modelled the organization of our thoughts, so much that now we tend to think of the linear and propositional structures of printed books as the most faithful representations of the way we organize thinking. But in spite of the paradigmatization of the ‘printed-thought’, a printed text is a very vague (and artificial) approximation of the flow of our thoughts”

We think in a ‘print’ way, in a physical-book way, not because that’s our ‘natural’ way to think, but because our society has developed an affinity for codex reading, with structures in place to select for its specific strengths. This has modelled our minds, and also our culture, so that organised, linear thought has long been prided as intellectually superior, as a sign of the brain working at its peak. Research into creativity and play, however, has revealed what has long been appreciated by artists, designers, musicians, and anyone who produces creative work on a regular basis: linear thought is certainly rare, and probably an illusion. There is no doubt that organising one’s thoughts into a cohesive narrative is useful, and often essential, but to suggest that it’s our default, or even most productive state is a folly sustained by the equating of mental efficacy with the inflexible drive forward of the printed word.

This teleology of the printed work is not part of the history of computing we bring with us to the screen. For most of us, digital reading has thus far been performed online in a sea of disparate webpages and hyperlinks. How could we read a novel on such a surface and not be affected? Writing, originating in the mundanities of cattle counting, was never meant to be anything more than functional. Visual art, and varieties of dance, poetry and storytelling, were the abundant forms of expression and preservation of information those few thousand years ago, and to think that they might be usurped by the scratchings of the first Sumerian accountants would have been, initially, untenable. The unpredictable factor, however, was writing media’s ability to affect the ways in which we think. Writing alters the minds with which it interacts because it doesn’t remain apart, it is interiorised; writing spaces are sites where ideas move in both directions: writers are written upon, readers feel themselves read.

Put bluntly, if we suddenly got to watch a film on the pages of a book tomorrow would it really feel like the same film we watched on a television or a cinema screen?

Hyperlinks, which Steven Johnson thinks of as punctuation, “the first significant form of punctuation to emerge in centuries,” have been the next step in changing the way in which our minds read, and they have been so successful that they need no longer be a part of the screen in order to affect us; they too have been sublimated. When a word is a hyperlink, that blue text might as well be the blue of a special effects screen on a Hollywood movie set, a site of infinite possibility for inscription. In the webs of text online, hyperlinks chart an authored path, whilst simultaneously reminding us that with Google only ever a few clicks away we could always break out from the text we’re reading to wash ourselves in information whose connections are of a much more arbitrary, or self-authored variety. That promise of hyperlinks now exists in all digital texts, whether they appear on the screen or not, and that weaves a gentle magic, existing as a fundamental, conscious or unconscious breakdown of the privileging of the author, and the immutability of bound paper text. Even if a digital document appears as ‘closed’ as a printed book we must, then, come to it subconsciously in a different frame of mind; our attitude to the text is often subtly changed, sometimes radically altered.

As Borges’ philosophy of translation encourages us to appreciate each translation of a work as a draft, rather than a corruption of some perfect originary text, so digitisation removes the fear that we might destroy a script object by altering it. If we don’t like the results of our play, then we can always return to previous iterations; we have no physical object to affect, only multiple versions, multiple drafts, multiple translations, with varying degrees of authorial involvement, and the threat of an ur-text reduced to a dull murmur.

Every change that I’ve discussed may well seem small. And when we ask what changes when we attempt to change nothing, when, for instance, we look at the pristine scanned pages of Borges’ Labyrinths and compare them to the bound book version, the exact same script in a different medium, then we can, surely, only talk about fractional amounts of effect upon the reader. But I believe that each element, each effect, is cumulative, and by repeatedly performing acts which question our assumptions about how a work should be received, and by deploying, as linguists and theorists, a more media-specific approach to what makes ‘text’ different from ‘script,’ we might see an incredibly productive shift, allowing us to return to classic, corporeal works with fresh eyes, and start to more fully appreciate what is truly vital to sustain in our reading practices as we continue to translate works into their digital counterparts.