Book Was There- Reading in Electronic Times

by Andrew Piper

  16. Edgar Allan Poe, “Berenice,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allen Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 210.

  17. See Noah Wardrip-Fruin et al., Screen (2002), in which you can bat around words with your hands; Marianne Schmidt, Digitie (2009), where you can wear a device that projects your hand onto a screen and allows you to interact with a remote person using the same device, a nice translation between the haptic and the visual; Chris O’Shea, Hand from Above (2009), a public installation that projects viewers onto a billboard being manipulated by a giant hand; Mark C. Marino, A Show of Hands (2007); Serge Bouchardon, Kevin Carpentiere, and Stéphanie Spenlé, To Touch (2009); and in particular, Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert, Loss of Grasp (2010), where the out of touchness of text provides a moving occasion to reflect on the triteness of language used in contemporary relationships.

  18. This oceanic (as opposed to terrestrial) nature of digital textuality has been nicely rendered in Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s Sea and Spar Between (2011), which algorithmically combines the writings of Melville and Dickinson to produce as many stanzas as there are fish in the sea (about 225 trillion). As you pass over them with the cursor, the lines of verse writhe, wiggle, and shift like marine life. http://www.saic.edu/webspaces/portal/degrees_resources/departments/writing/DNSP11_SeaandSparBetween/index.html. For the classic example of an intentionally disappearing digital text, see William Gibson’s Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (1992), which was designed to become unreadable after a single use.

  19. For a discussion on the nature of the materiality of digital texts, see Matthew Kirschenbaum’s prize-winning study, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). To give just one example of the complexity of digital text’s thereness, in order to make the opening line of Faust’s famous monologue legible on a standard web browser would require something like the equivalent of 8,062 lines of code. The question that the bibliographer F. W. Bateson once famously asked, “If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is Hamlet?” has only gotten more complicated today.

  20. Shelley Jackson, “Eyelid,” My Body—A Wunderkammer (1997), http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/jackson__my_body_a_wunderkammer/eyelid.html. This might also be one reason digital texts bluster so often about the body as a form of compensation. As Alan Sondheim writes in Internet Text, “Spread your lips, smell your hands. Finger your ass, smell your fingers. Squeeze your balls, smell your hands. Squeeze your cock, smell your fingers. Would you be my animal.” http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/sondheim__internet_text.html.

  21. For new research in haptic computing, see the work of the MIT Touch Lab and the UBC Human Communication Technologies Lab, among others. For a discussion of the historical relationship between touch and technology, see Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (New York: Berg, 2007). On “handheld culture,” see Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo, eds., Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). This renewed attention to design and interactivity is often denoted as a “material turn” in computing studies, distinguishing itself from older concerns about virtuality and simulation. See Erica Robles and Mikael Wiberg, “Texturing the ‘Material Turn’ in Interaction Design,” Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interaction TEI ‘10 (New York: AMC Press, 2010), 137–44.

  22. On the history of the button, see Finn Brunton, “The Single Abrupt Movement: Gesture, Interface, Mechanization” (forthcoming).

  23. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 41.

  24. For a discussion of online forums where computer programmers talk about their pain, see Michele White, The Body and the Screen, 186. For a discussion of “text neck,” see http://text-neck.com/. As the Text Next Institute writes on its website: “Medical research has shown that long term forward head posture will cause early spinal arthritis, disc degeneration, headaches, up to a 30% decrease in lung capacity to just name a few conditions. A survey was conducted with 6,000 chronic headache sufferers and the only common finding among them was the loss or reversal of the normal curve in the neck.”

  25. In the new Alice for iPad reading interface, when you shake the iPad it “unlocks” secret passageways through the text. It replaces a mental operation—who hasn’t created their own subterranean passage through a book?—with a physically determinate one.

  26. As numerous critics have pointed out, the mind is freer when not following the constrained pathways of hypertext. What interests me is the way corporal activity is repeatedly posited as a solution to the inactivity of reading. We fear reading’s inaction, a point that could be tied to a larger anxiety about the place of the humanities today, a field of knowledge that depends heavily on the inertia of reading. In this sense, the humanities lack “action” and thus “impact.” For a critique of the myth of interactivity, see Marjorie Perloff, “Digital Poetics and Differential Text,” New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, ed. Adelaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 143–64.

  27. Mark Bauerlein, “Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 19, 2008, http://chronicle.com/article/Online-Literacy-Is-a-Lesser/28307.

  28. For a more extensive discussion of Morrissey and for an indispensable introduction to the canon of electronic literature, see N. Katherine Hayles’s anthology, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Ward-Phillips, 2008).

  29. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms, 26.

  30. In December 2009, the Bush administration claimed to have “lost” 22 million e-mails. “You can’t erase e-mails, not today,” Senator Patrick Leahy remarked during a passionate speech from the Senate floor. “They’ve gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there—they just don’t want to produce them. It’s like the infamous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes.” Leahy’s comparison to the Nixon “tapes” was not only good political theater. It was also an insightful comment about the historical dynamic of the lost and found of information. That we had been here before with tapes, and not servers, was an example of something recurrent, something that extends deep into the bibliographic record. See Pete Yost, “22 Million Missing Bush White House Emails Found,” Associated Press, December 14, 2009.

  31. For research into questions of digital preservation, see Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use,” NEH Whitepaper (2008), http://www.neh.gov/ODH/Default.aspx?tabid=111&id=37; the numerous articles in the International Journal of Digital Curation; and the ongoing work of the Open Planets Foundation.

  32. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 81.

  33. The origin of the bedtime story as both a widespread practice and a genre of writing dates back to the 1870s. See Patricia Crain, “Bedtime Stories,” Reading: Selected Essays from the English Institute, ed. Joseph Slaughter (Cambridge, MA: English Institute in Collaboration with the American Council of Learned Societies, forthcoming). For a discussion of the relationship between sleep and reading, see Seth Lerer, “Epilogue: Falling Asleep over the History of the Book,” PMLA 121, no. 1 (2006): 229–34. For a discussion of the historical convergence of reading and dreaming, see Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1–17.

  34. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: Norton, 2002), 13.

  35. As researcher Kalina Christoff has argued, the mind is not only more active when it wanders, but it does so in a more associative way than during focused cognition. “Although it may undermine our immediate goals,” writes Christoff, “mind wandering may enable the parallel o
peration of diverse brain areas in the service of distal goals that extend beyond the current task.” Kalina Christoff et al., “Experience Sampling during fMRI Reveals Default Network and Executive System Contributions to Mind Wandering,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 21 (2009): 8719–24, and J. W. Schooler et al., “Meta-Awareness, Perceptual Decoupling, and the Wandering Mind,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, no. 7 (2011): 319–26.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Honoré de Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 40.

  2. On the relationship between looking and reading, see Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), and Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain (New York: Viking, 2009), 122–42; and Mark Changizi, The Vision Revolution (Dallas: Benbella Books, 2009), 163–210.

  3. Authorial portraits in books date back at least to the oldest extant manuscript of Virgil from the Vergilius Romanus manuscript in the Vatican library of the late fifth century AD. The earliest print authorial frontispiece is thought to be Aesopus, Vita et Fabulae (Strasbourg: Heinrich Knoblochtzer, [1485?]), although like its manuscript predecessors it lacks any resemblance to the art of portraiture that would come to dominate frontispieces in the seventeenth century. See David Piper, The Image of the Poet: British Poets and their Portraits (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982); Ruth Mortimer, A Portrait of the Author in Sixteenth-Century France (Chapel Hill, NC: Hanes Foundation, 1980); and Margaret M. Smoth, The Title Page: Its Early Development, 1460–1510 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2000) 79, 88.

  4. For a discussion of Byron, portraiture, and the birth of celebrity culture, see Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). For a discussion of the role of the portrait in Balzac, see Isabelle Mimouni, Balzac illusionniste: Les arts dans l’oeuvre de l’écrivain (Paris: Adam Biro, 1999), 26–53.

  5. Andrew Keen, The Sunday Edition, CBC Radio, July 15, 2007.

  6. The Odes of Pindar, vol. 1, trans. Peter Edmund Laurent (Oxford: Munday and Slatter, 1824), 40.

  7. For a discussion of the visual acquisition of letters, see Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 137–42, 172–93, and Mark Changizi, The Vision Revolution, 163–210. It should be noted that after an initial neurological overlap between the visual acquisition of letters and faces, these objects are processed in slightly separate regions of the brain. They may be processually similar, but their handling ultimately occupies different spaces of the brain’s geography.

  8. For a discussion of the political consequences of physiognomic thought, see Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004).

  9. Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, ed. Christoph Siegrist (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 152.

  10. See Hans Blumenberg’s classic study The Legibility of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). For a discussion of the way writing changed visual knowledge from writing’s inception in the third millennium BC, see Denise Schmandt-Besserat, who writes, “In the literate period, reading images becomes akin to reading texts.” When Writing Met Art: From Symbol to Story (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 25.

  11. Paul Valéry, “My Faust,” in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, vol. 3, Plays, trans. D. Paul and R. Fitzgerald (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 32.

  12. On intersections between the history of photography and the book, see Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Peggy Ann Kusnerz, ed., “Special Issue: Photography and the Book,” History of Photography 26, no. 3 (2002); Andrew Roth, The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present (Göteborg: Hasselblad Center, 2004); Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, eds., The Photobook: A History, 2 vols. (London: Phaidon, 2004); and François Brunet, “Photography and the Book,” Photography and Literature (London: Reaktion, 2009), 35–62.

  13. Cited in Julian Cox and Colid Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003), 66.

  14. Andrew Piper, “Transitional Figures: Image, Translation and the Ballad from Broadside to Photography,” Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, ed. Christina Ionescu (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 157–91.

  15. Eudora Welty, “A Sweet Devouring,” in The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (New York: Random House, 1977), 280.

  16. For a discussion of the aesthetics of the webcam, see Michele White, The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 57–84. For a review of the new aesthetics of portraiture, see William A. Ewing, Face: The New Photographic Portrait (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006).

  17. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).

  18. Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997), 3.

  19. Naomi S. Baron, Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  20. Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).

  21. One definition of pornography is that it is comprised of a set of visual practices whose primary aim is to conflate the sensory experiences of site and touch. In this, there is a correlation between the type of close looking that the web promotes and the type of content that is its most prevalent visual material. Commentators remark often enough on the importance of pornography to the development of the web. But would it be going too far to say that the kind of close looking that the web promotes is always in a sense veering towards the pornographic? For a useful discussion of the problematic art-historical distinctions between “art” and “pornography,” see Kelly Dennis, Art/Porn (New York and Oxford: Berg, 2009).

  22. Walter Benjamin, “Convolute N,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 456–89, 458.

  23. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Vintage, 1996), 376 (modified from the original). For a contemporary update of the idea, see Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers (2007), which was shown as an outdoor exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art.

  24. First, to clarify some terms: a 419 letter is the e-mail you receive almost daily in your in-box asking you for money (“Dear Sir . . .”). The sock puppet is a fake persona created for social networking sites to promote products but also for the purposes of military surveillance. With the invention of three-dimensional printing, researchers have now begun to experiment with printing cells and replacement organic tissue for the body. On the complicated distinctions between human and machine communication, see Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us about What It Means to Be Alive (New York: Doubleday, 2011), 9. On the zombie as the new icon of modern life, see the inspired piece by Chuck Klostermann, “My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life Feels Rather Undead,” New York Times, December 3, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/arts/television/05zombies.html. For a discussion of the vast amount of organic waste being manufactured in the biological sciences today that is technically “alive” but not afforded the same rights as living “beings,” see Thierry Bardini, Junkware (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 23.

  25. Talan Memmott, “Delimited Meshings,” Cauldron and Net 3 (Spring 2001): http://www.studiocleo.com/cauldron/volume3/index.html. For a discussion of the way Facebook moves us from a social model based around groups to one comprised of “eg
ocentric networks,” see Danah Boyd, “Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Networking Sites,” First Monday 11, no. 12 (2006): http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1418/1336.

  26. On the history of the “optical unconscious,” which is a term that derives from the work of Walter Benjamin, and the centrality of the graph to modern art, see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

  27. For a review of the issues, see Susan B. Barnes “A Privacy Paradox: Social Networking in the United States,” First Monday 11, no. 9 (2006); Anders Albrechtslund, “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance,” First Monday 13, no. 3 (2008); and James Grimmelmann, “The Privacy Virus,” in Facebook and Philosophy, ed. D. E. Wittkower (Chicago: Open Court, 2010), 3–13. In response to the pervasive surveillance of digital media, there is a host of new critical work on techniques of sousveillance, practices of observing digital surveillance. See Steve Mann and Robert Guerra, “The Witnessential Net,” Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing (2001): 47–54, and Jason Nolan, Steve Mann, and Barry Wellman, “Sousveillance: Wearable and Digital Tools in Surveilled Environments,” in Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools, ed. Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 179–96.

  28. Don DeLillo, Valparaiso (New York: Scribner, 2003), 25. For a history of the emergence of privacy, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For current reflections on the withdrawal of privacy from contemporary life, see Jeffrey Rosen, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” New York Times Magazine, July 15, 2010, and Harry Blatterer, Pauline Johnson, and Maria Markus, eds. Modern Privacy: Shifting Boundaries, New Forms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010).

  29. This work counts as its spiritual forerunners not only that of Cameron, but also Lee Friedlander’s collection of interrupted self-images in Self-Portrait (New York: Haywire Press, 1970) and his collection of photographs of television screens in Little Screens (San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2001). See also the role that pixelation and the photographic blur play more recently in the photographs of Thomas Ruff and the photo-realist paintings of Gerhard Richter.