Book Was There- Reading in Electronic Times

by Andrew Piper

  If the book wheel called upon a certain kind of athletic reading (like the fervent fly), it was the invention of the bookshelf that projected a more patient as well as optical relationship to reading—of seeing, but also being seen. As Henry Petroski has pointed out in his marvelous history of the bookshelf, bookshelves did not always look the way they do today, and books were not always stacked vertically next to one another with their spines out.21 But as the bookshelf gradually developed into its modern form, strolling through the “stacks” of libraries or bookstores was often seen as a way of being fashionable. The setting of all those elegantly bound books in nice cases cast a flattering light on one’s own sense of personal encasement.

  As readers strolled by bookshelves looking at each other, they were no doubt also making mental images of the books that were passing by. They were reading the place of books. As Sartre writes of browsing through his grandfather’s study as a young boy, “Though I did not yet know how to read, I already revered those standing stones: upright or leaning over, close together like bricks on the book-shelves or spaced out nobly in lanes of menhirs. They all looked alike. I disported myself in a tiny sanctuary, surrounded by ancient, heavy-set monuments which had seen me into the world, which would see me out of it, and whose permanence guaranteed me a future as calm as the past.”22 The meaning of the book is as much tied to its cumulative nature as its singularity. “Stacks” are a sign of the book’s stability, the way in aggregate it acquires an architectural function. The book is also an infrastructure.

  When I glance at a row of spines or a few briefly opened volumes, I am thinking about reading not only visually, but also speculatively. I am collecting “shoots” that might one day grow into something more robust. The outward turned spine is a site of potentiality, of what might be. Like medieval readers who were taught to put ideas in certain places in their minds, when I browse I am locating ideas in physical space, to be returned to later. As in Sartre’s account, stacks of books convey a sense of the durability of ideas.

  Outsourcing browsing to our machines (that “browsers” are no longer people but programs) means that we are losing this sense of embodiment when it comes to browsing. As we meander our way through the web, our bodies are as inert as they were in the corner, but our minds are as energetic as before the book wheel. We are conflating two different kinds of reading that once belonged to two different spaces. In this, we are losing a sense of the differentiated time of reading, the long durations of the corner and the ambulatory, punctuated rhythms of the bookshelf. But we are also losing a sense of place. When we browse online, there are no corporal connections being made between what we’ve seen and where we’ve seen it. We have no physical and mental place to “put” our ideas gathered from our browsing, the results of our mental churning. Without books and their shelves, we lose a fundamental component of what it means to browse, to glance at books.

  . . .

  Today, reading is imagined to be everywhere. The idea of “pervasive computing” pervades how we think about the digital.23 Where there is a computer, however small, there is something to be read. Miniaturization is no longer in the service of forgetting the book before you. It is a reminder that its computational twin is always there. Even in your toaster: Tatsuya Narita has invented a way to print out the day’s weather from an RSS feed onto your morning toast (Tenkipan, 2009).

  If digital texts are increasingly everywhere, they will also tell you where you are. “Locative media” has become one of the fastest growing segments of new reading tools, as GPS data is gradually integrated into our reading interfaces.24 WikiMe arranges information not according to keyword, but by location. Citysense synthesizes data on the location of mobile device users and projects it onto a live map of urban activity. Fwix clusters news around physical locations so you can observe the information density of geographic spaces. Foursquare allows you to locate your friends to “catch up” with them. Graffitio creates virtual walls that correspond to real spaces where people can post “notes.” When you approach these places your device will show you other people’s postings. They can be practical and banal, but, like graffiti, at times deeply esoteric. They preserve, albeit in virtual form, a sense of mystery to urban reading.

  In a world of locative media, it is increasingly hard to get lost, even for someone like me who is deeply navigationally challenged. (When I lived in New York my brother gave me a compass labeled Eastside/Westside and Uptown/Downtown for the four points of the compass. It was low-tech, but it worked.) In a world of mobile GPS devices, we are always somewhere. We read to catch up with others or be found by them. We no longer lose ourselves in our reading, like Augustine who for a brief moment heard the voice of God in his garden or the members of the zine Punk who wanted to piss on the establishment and start over.

  Despite this intensification of place, digital reading can also feel like it is happening in many places at once. Perhaps this is what the vogue of locative media is all about. It is a corrective to the distributed nature of online reading. However much information may be place-bound, it is not necessarily the place where I am. Seeing where information dwells around the city or the world is a way of seeing oneself pulled in numerous directions. I am always “catching up,” in the words of Foursquare. Unlike the compressions of the corner, reading online is centrifugal. This too has a printed past, as early eighteenth-century critics of the newspaper were fond of asking why readers in London cared about what was going on in faraway Poland or Sweden.25 We read in and we read out.

  Today, outward is definitely in. We increasingly speak of transmedia, transaesthetics, transdisciplinarity, the transfinite, and the transnational (well at least some of us do). The transitive property reins. Instead of all those things bumping into each other in the world of the “inter” (that bygone world of intermediality, interdisciplinarity, and, remember it? the Internet), we now just span. Ted Nelson’s dream of “stretchtext” seems to have become the new standard.26

  In new media artist Giselle Beiguelman’s Egoscópio (2002), commercial billboards in São Paulo’s high-tech district projected websites submitted by residents of the city. By giving these quasi-public spaces back to residents, her project was intended as a way of reconfiguring corporate ownership, “a hacking of the city structure,” in Beiguelman’s words.27 But it was also a way of visualizing the increasingly distributed nature of reading. Even the billboard, that most static and monumental of reading spaces, was integrated into a broader geographic circuit. As a kind of massive urban playbill or broadside, the billboard in Beiguelman’s work was shown to span social space.

  Or consider the urban narrative project Nonchalance (2009), where readers participated in a story that took place across an entire city, in this case San Francisco. It was one of many such projects across the world that are known as alternative reality games, such as Hundekopf in Berlin or the series of works by Blast Theory in London or the Trans Reality Lab in Göteborg, Sweden. Consisting of everyday textual objects that routinely circulate in a city, such as flyers, tickets, sidewalk chalk drawings, or protest posters (fig. 6.7), as well as websites coordinated around real space, readers are led through stories tied to the historical identities of specific neighborhoods. The urban reader no longer seeks out the nook for the sake of getting lost, taking a rest, or taking a leak. He or she is now persistently on a quest for meaning.

  Unlike the tourist for whom the book disappears before the monument and then reappears later as a space of memory, the new transitive nature of urban reading spans the space of the page and the real space behind it. There is a simultaneity about it, as it layers reading on top of real space in an interactive way. In so doing, it actively rewrites our sense of place. In William Shaw’s 41 Places (2007), for example, stories were installed in various locations around Brighton, England—a story about gay marriage at the Town Hall, a story about a visitor looking at a painting of a woman reading to her daughter at the Brighton Museum, a story about a dropped cell phone at a
local nightclub. It drew upon the earlier work by Renate Stih and Frieder Schnock, Places of Remembrance (1993), in which signs of anti-Semitic laws from the Nazi period were recreated and placed in former Jewish quarters of Berlin. In these urban reading experiments, which update the graffiti art of the 1970s in more institutional terms, text and place are ever more tightly woven together.

  [FIGURE 6.7] Image taken from the immersive game Nonchalance (2009). Courtesy of the game’s creator, Jeff Hull.

  Such projects reconfigure reading not as a form of intimacy, as an act of repose, but instead as one of focalization. As the creators of Nonchalance argue, “It is in this space—this highly authentic, reassuringly tangible ‘real’ world—that we’re able to affect consciousness. Awareness is heightened; perspective altered.”28 But this kind of situated reading is also understood as transitional, in the sense of multisited. Reading “moves” us in a whole new way as we piece these relational parts together and move from one place to another. This is true now even when we sit down. In Newscoons (2008), which was shown at the National Art Museum in Beijing, chairs project aggregations of news from around the world, grouped by different keywords (body, alienation, recombinant, etc.).29 Reading furniture no longer holds the text so that we may dream of somewhere else (or no place at all). The chair is the text, a text explicitly of and from somewhere else. The elsewhere is always a somewhere that is also right there. The transitive property reins.

  . . .

  Inside of every computer, at the very bottom of it all, lies a tree. The tree is one of the most elementary structures of all programming languages, whether it is the bifurcating nature of the if/then statement or the computational logic of the binary tree. The arboreal roots of the book have migrated into our computers, nicely turned outward in projects like Stefanie Posavec’s “literary organisms,” which turn books into treelike structures (fig. 6.8).30

  Historians of ideas tell us that it was during the eighteenth century when the tree of knowledge began to give way to the knowledge “field.”31 Hierarchically ordered categories based on descending branches of knowledge were being replaced by adjacent, yet slightly porous fields. The sequentially ordered “leaf” was no longer at the center of learning; instead it was the topographical map. The foldout emerged as one of the premier textual instruments of the Enlightenment.32 At the very moment that readers were heading out into the woods, in other words, the tree was already becoming a relic of thought. The computational tree has ironically only further accelerated the growth of knowledge fields.

  Leaving the woods for the field has most often been thought of as a way of moving from darkness into light.33 As Robert Harrison has written in his magnificent study on forests, “Forests recede from the civic horizon, appear through the pathos of distance, lengthen their shadows in the cultural imagination.”34 But leaving the forest for the field is also a move into a space of work. Unlike forests, fields must be tended. We may get lost in the woods, but fields make us tired, physically and visually. Fields extend beyond our lines of sight. They mark a horizon line. But fields also bring ourselves into view. In the field we are always exposed.

  [FIGURE 6.8] In this “literary organism,” by Stefanie Posavec, we see her signature visual analysis of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Each branch corresponds to a section of the essay, and each leaf corresponds to a sentence. The size of the leaf displays the relative word length (the longest sentence in the essay is 126 words), while the colors of the leaves refer to five interpretive categories: key point, quotation, anecdote, explanation of quotation or anecdote, and italicized words. Courtesy of the artist.

  The rise of the field as a way of thinking about both knowledge and reading is one sign of how we have become fearful of reading’s recesses. We are suspicious of the corner and the bower, of reading’s folds. We are suspicious, I think, of the book’s intimacy and its immeasurability.

  As fields of knowledge continue to expand—as they continue to stretch beyond our capacity to know them in their entirety, as they continue to stretch us—there is a growing need to create more spaces for decompression. How can we imagine places of technology that generate repose and not just exposure? We need to remember the trees, not out of a false sense of naturalism, but for the type of place, and therefore the type of thinking, that they make possible. We need to remember the trellis (the canopy, the overhang, and the overstory) and not just the single tree (the trunk, the root, and the story). We need to remember the intermittent respite provided by the leaf.

  There is reason here to be optimistic. Like museums, libraries are emerging as important actors within civic life. We have rediscovered just how important these pockets of reading are to the transitive properties of urban experience. Library attendance in North America is increasing, and library construction now stands as a showpiece of urban or regional renewal.35 The bookstore, long thought dead, is being reimagined as a space of temporary respite, but also material encounter. In place of the timelessness of the independent store, like Shakespeare & Company, or the sheer inertia of the big-box store, like Barnes & Noble (at least it does seem to mark the end of the ampersand), in these newly reimagined spaces we are getting in touch with the stuff of reading—not just books but the numerous objects to which they are related. The bookstore is being reconceived as a space of transitory materialization.36 Experiments in the creation of temporary libraries are emerging, too, like the Reanimation Library in New York that is comprised of a collection of books “deaccessioned” from public libraries or the Bedouin Library that is a traveling collection of works based on cultural stereotypes of the nomadic Arab. Even the bookmobile is making a comeback.37 Reading, according to these examples, is becoming more situated, not in the sense of global “positioning,” but rather in a more discontinuous, temporary, recessed kind of way—transitive, yet contained. Much like our eighteenth-century forebearers, we are trying to put place back into reading.

  This past week we bought our daughter her first desk. This is where she tells us she will do her “bricolage”—all that experimental work with paper that includes glue, scissors, paint, stamps, ink, stickers, and anything else that can be minutely partitioned or chaotically aggregated. (When she comes down with her ink-stained hands I always imagine this is what it was like in the old days when a printer came home from work.) It is a material prelude to what she will one day do with the ideas she finds in books or online. But the desk is also about locating this kind of mental and physical labor in space. It is about containing the medley of our inner bricoleur. Virginia Woolf may have prioritized a room of one’s own as the condition of a writer’s or reader’s life, but I personally think it starts with the desk. Who can forget one’s first desk and the bizarre array of items it contained and that somehow belonged together?

  When my daughter reads in the future, she will no doubt read more transitively than we have in the past. With her ubiquitous devices in tow, she will be in constant conversation with the ambient fields of digital agents surrounding her both near and far (cell towers, server farms, other human-bearing devices). She will know where she is when she reads, but so too will someone else. Reading will have a profound sense of place, even as place will be defined by a bifurcated sense of being both here and there. Her reading will be stretched.

  But her reading will be stretched in another sense as well, in the sense of personal stress or pressure. The pressure of reading, that it can be anything but pleasurable at times, certainly predates the digital. Indeed, in many ways it is linked to that first technology, the press, that gave birth to the increased spread and functionalization of reading. But if Moore’s law holds for transistors, then so too for reading. We have entered into an exponential relationship to the growth of reading material. Like many parents or educators, I worry that the growing expanse of reading pulls us apart, not just socially, but also personally. The incessant insistence on the functionality of reading—that there must be some “
value” to it—only amplifies this problem. When there is so much more to read and when we are always reading for some purpose, we are only ever “catching up.” We never have the chance to incorporate, digest, curl up, close off, recede.

  In the next chapter, I will discuss some of the ways that individuals are developing tools to contend with this problem of the surplus of digital reading. It is here where we can see the emergence of new strategies for browsing and new ways of thinking about reading synoptically. But alongside reading’s increasing sense of span, I also hope that there will continue to be way stations where my children can get lost for a bit, where they can lose a sense of place, where they can recoil. We need technologies, but also places, that contain such “data pores”38—not just synthetic spaces, but holes within the field, areas of immeasurability, pockets of discontinuity, one-way streets, dead ends, and hollows. For now, the book is still the ultimate data pore.

  SEVEN

  By the Numbers

  In schools the math and writing master are usually one and the same. But a master of writing books is seldom good at math.

  JEAN PAUL [the flailing years]

  Counting and recounting have been at the heart of reading since its inception. The earliest forms of writing were notches on bones, dating from around 30,000 BC. As in the biblical story of Adam’s rib, bones are where we record our debts. Clay tokens with symbols impressed upon them were used for the dual purposes of accounting and recounting as far back as 8,000 BC in Turkey, and in the Balkans the Vinča culture produced pottery with over two hundred different symbols for similar ends around 5,000 BC. Even the earliest records of proto-alphabetic writing in the third millennium were most often lists and ledgers used for counting purposes, a point no less true with the advent of literature.1 Whether it was Aesop’s Fables or Mother Goose rhymes, A Thousand and One Nights or Boccaccio’s Decameron, Poe’s insistence that composing “The Raven” was akin to solving a mathematical problem, or even Spinoza’s Ethics with its geometric proof of the existence of God, the stories we tell ourselves are entwined with the way we count. Literacy and numeracy are related to one another at a deep anthropological level.