More great stuff on the so-called death of the book, this time by Clay Shirky, who reminds us that not only is it “impossible to be pro-book and anti-revolution”; being pro-book also entails recognizing that the form of the book is subject to change.
Prior to Gutenberg, most of the books in Europe were the Bible; scribal production was so slow that simply recopying that one book took up much of the available output. After Gutenberg, publishers began experimenting with new forms—novels, scientific papers, periodicals of all sorts.
That is, the kinds of information that effectively counted—that were of sufficient (or potentially sufficient) importance to merit a run on the printing press—expanded rapidly & irreversibly. As Shirky points out, a whole lot of garbage flowed into that vacuum & scandalized everyone.
But we managed, even though the volume of garbage hasn’t been reduced all that much. We’ve learned to identify the kinds of publications that interest us, & we’ve seen that a lot of the good stuff still rises to the top. Of course, some truly horrible shit still sells well; that’s the price you pay when you open up the means of production. But that’s been the case since the printing press took off, & trudging through the cesspool still seems infinitely more desirable than being handcuffed to the pre-Gutenberg Church monopoly.
It’s worth noting that most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient. Readily available translations of scripture did destroy the Church as a pan-European institution. Most of the material produced by the new class of publishers was flyweight. Scribes did lose their social function. And so on, through a battery of transformations including public scrutiny of elites, the international spread of political foment, and even literate women.
The thing I want to point out here—Shirky doesn’t take this tack explicitly—is this: while the current Most Loud Wringer-of-Hands (the literary establishment, which is part & parcel with the humanities) doesn’t actually need to control the means of literary production, it’s going to get itself into some Gutenberg-era Church-style trouble if it continues to insist that it does. The humanities has no good reason, really, to believe that we’ll all be out of a job if we fail to prevent the “death of the book.” When did we forget that our job isn’t to talk about books but to talk about thought & the words that express it?
This doesn’t mean that the literary forms to which we’re accustomed are going to wither & die. I doubt that people will stop writing novels & stories (& maybe even poems). I also doubt that people will stop reading such works. Will everyone have a filled floor-to-ceiling bookcase? I doubt that, but that’s a different question entirely.
What I do know is this: it’s altogether too late for the literary establishment or anyone else to enforce this notion that the physical book should be the privileged form for literary output. If we insist otherwise, we’re going to be in a fix, because there’s nothing we humans like less than being told what we can & cannot think or read. & the literary establishment has a great deal less clout than the Church had when it comes to enslaving people’s minds & enforcing censorship. But that’s the cast that a great deal of this death-of-the-book nonsense has taken on, & it’s really unbecoming.
Here’s the other thing: we’re supposed to be the least trammeled when it comes to freedom of thought & expression. We like thinking new thoughts & learning new things. Well, new things are happening, & if the literary establishment is going to keep telling us that the things that we’re interested in “don’t count”, then that’s too damned bad, but there’s a whole lot of really interesting artistic work being done & damned if I’m going to miss it. If the humanities won’t have us, we’ll take our clever little brains & go someplace that will.
The humanities only has one other choice: to change. As Shirky puts it:
It is too early to tell whether the internet’s effect on media will be as radical as that of the printing press. It is not too early to tell that there is nothing that happened between 1450 and now that comes close. It is also not too early to tell that we are in for a significant transformation of intellectual life, and the lesson from the last revolution is that the way to make society better is not to try to preserve the old forms, but to experiment, wildly, with new ones, including hybridization of the book with the web.
These are exciting times. This is, in fact, supposed to be the very stuff that we literary-critical types should be getting all in an excited, ridiculous, hopeful lather about. Technology is allowing us to innovate in ways that have never been possible, & we’re lucky enough to be here to watch these patterns emerge. Simple example: we’ve struggled for centuries with the problem of how to tell a four-dimensional, non-linear narrative within the constraints of the necessarily-linear page. We’ve seen remarkable solutions to this problem, from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1756) to Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (which doesn’t even have a publication date, really), to Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984, which was published in two versions, male & female). These works aren’t going to get any less compelling than they already are; but the internet’s virtual nature allows us to remap space & even time with something as simple as a link. Really amazing things could happen in fields like genre or narratology (but that’s a rant for another time). For now, I’m just pleased to be here, excited at the prospect of seeing new forms of art & of learning to feel comfortable reading & thinking in ways that currently overclock my mental CPU to even consider.
But right now the humanities can’t seem to be able to look past its fearful visions of the upswelling of dross that we’ll have to sort through, or how much money we’re going to lose in our already-negligible book sales, or the horrifying idea that we might find ourselves, along with everyone else, having to learn how to read again.
I’m sorry, but that’s just bullshit.
(Thanks to Jacob from Conventioneers! for linking this in comments.)
