The Order of Books, Roger Chartier, (Trans., Lydia Cochrane):
Dickie's Summaries & Connections to a Digital Culture
Preface
Though the book is obviously not intended to deal with the digital environment,
Chartier does say on p. ix. "keen attention should be paid to the technical,
visual, and physical devices that organize the reading of writing when writing
becomes a book." There is no reason to think that we shouldn't also
pay close attention to the "technical, visual, and physical devices
that organize the reading and writing" done online. I would insist
on including (as Chartier does) the economic systems that support the reading/writing
that we study.
His primary goal is to balance the two definitions of culture: "the
aesthetic or intellectual appreciation" and the "ordinary, banal
practices" of a community . . . combining concerns about the "significative
force" of some works at the same time he considers the practices and
institutions that make them possible. I like this approach, hard as it is.
He's reflecting on "how the author was constructed, on the rules
for the formation of communities or readers, [and] on the significance invested
in the building of libraries (with or without walls)" (xi).
Communities of Readers
His questions include: how, in the ancien regime, did the increased circulation
of printed matter transform forms of sociability, permit new modes of thought,
and change people's power relationships?
His primary assumption is that "forms produce meaning and that a
text, . . . , is invested with new meaning and status when mechanisms that
make it available to interpretation change" (3). He proposes a history
of reading and readership:
- 16th & 17th cent. = mystical readings works towards "absolute
[spiritual] detachment."
- Readers have moved from their incidental status to their role of "creating"
the text. His notion follows that of D. F. McKenzie: "new readers
make new texts and their new meanings are a function of their new forms."
New "forms" seem to be foisted on us every day. We have but
to choose and area of human endeavor and then attend to the new forms being
made available to the actors in that endeavor. Edu. Communities of readers
are now connecting via email and web access. They chat in synch. and asynch.
modes in order to connect with folks (often at a distance) who have similar
interests and inclinations. How critical is it then these days to find the
sites and means of connecting with those communities of reader/composers?
How critical is the infrastructure that allows you to make those connections?
- "Reading is not uniquely an abstract operation of the intellect:
it brings the body into play, it is inscribed in a space and a relationship
with oneself or with others" (8). "There is no text apart from
the physical support that offers it for reading" (9).
- The text, the book, the reader: 1) motivated creation of the text (why
this text? Why now? Why to these folks?) 2) the production infrastructure
behind the book 3) availability or access to the readerly process by audiences.
- Form changes texts: breaking up of scripture changes "coherence,"
bibliotheque bleue for common people, shortening texts adding graphics,
illustrations, simplifying, anticipatory headings, recapitulative summaries,
in order to "inscribe the text into a cultural matrix that was not
the one that its original creators had in mind" (p.14). They were
creating new publics. (pp. 17) Sounds A LOT like the kind of changes
being suggested in technical writing classes and the complaints that we
hear about what's happening to texts being put on the WWW.
- Reading patterns: oral/mumbled vs. silent; respectful reading of few
texts vs. thorough reading of many texts; private, cloistered reading vs.
collective reading; I would add reactive vs. interactive reading that
requires some percentage of the audience to respond. (email lists and the
like)
- (p. 19) Readers not nec. writers. Two different practices: same
is true of new WWW.
- How do the new material forms effect communication as they did in the
past: images volantes (illustrated broadsheets), placards, occasionnels,
little blue books?
Figures of the Author
D. F. McKenzie--"the physical forms through which texts are transmitted
to their readers (or their auditors [censors, ideological police] affect
the process of the construction of meaning" (p. 28).
- Uses Foucault's "Author function" to analyze historical reconnection
of the text to the author. It is a function of only some discourses, those
where the gov. recognizes the "penal responsibility" of authors
and the existence of literary property.
- Foucault's analysis only harkens back to 17th and 18th century but
Chartier is pointing back much further ((1500's) and to other determinations:
Monarchs try to limit booksellers' copyrights (privilege) and give to author,
who is supported by the king. Plagiarism, paraphrasing and citation styles
seem to be coming out of this work (p. 36).
- The form becomes a marketable item, a negotiable commodity, shifting
away from the patronage system (p. 37). Makes the author function available
to more folks because they don't have to depend solely on the patronage
or personal fortunes of previous authors, though they claim that the writing
for pay is demeaning the art. A common complaint even today. New media
expands the publishing potential yet again to those who have access.
- La Croix du Maine's Premier Volume and title page with author,
dedicatee and bookseller or printer-publisher becomes important when penal
responsibilities are enforced on author, printer, or reader (they are all
equally culpable).
Our current patronage system is handled primarily by state institutions
(state gov., universities, federal projects).
Shouldn't the AF also include an accommodation to the "need"
to act out of and into the culture? In the case of TC, to actually form
the institutions of publication & their practices. We are experimenting
our way into a MM compositional environment.
- Pastiche publishing comes out of copying and early printing process.
- (59) ordering all attempts to establish textual classifications commanding
the rules for the publications of texts. Who looses and gains when digital
realm of publication is made available to an untrained & unauthorized
group?
Libraries Without Walls
The concept of the library of all human thought started with the first
written word; or at least the possibility of that process became possible.
- The space of the library in 1785 in the form of a "basilica .
. . devoted to reading . . . which recuperates a sacred character that
ecclesiastical buildings had lost . . . ." The University became
the closest approximation to the eccelescastical state of the late Middle
ages.
- Proliferation of texts because of printing ends the idea of a physical
location for the universal library but the dream lives on in the minds
of the 20th century hypertext enthusiasts.
- Libraries are a way to distribute intellectual property to public.
Kalmbach makes this point with publishing technology. All "advances"
tend to distribute the ability to publish work to a broader audience. The
library is a way to distribute that work to a broader audience. Our connection
to the WWW is now providing another combination of publishing and distribution.
- The bibliotheque was either a house of books or a collection of works
by the same nature of Author. A virtual library. They also began
indexes or catalogues.
- The tension between comprehensiveness and essence was obvious and still
is. The need for selectivity seems all the more important today just
as the hope of comprehensiveness seems further buried beneath the effervescent
weight of digital communications.
- With the innovation of "library" came the technologies of
indexing and classification that we take for granted. How things are classified
shows the priorities of the time. The WWW is organized by URL, little
digital spaces connected synchronously by IP packets that fly about the
network of networks using a defined protocol. Perhaps a better visual metaphor
for this development is not the orderly dream libraries depicted in Chartier's
book but a briar patch stretching to the horizon.
Epilogue
- (90) "If texts are emancipated from the form that has conveyed
them since the first centuries of the Christian era . . . by the same token
all intellectual technologies and all the operations at work in the production
of meaning will be modified. Loosing the "bookness" of content
is as dangerous as it is exciting: again, the vertigo & euphoria that
Johndan talks about.
- Primary question: NOT the "supposed disappearance of writing but
the revolution in the forms of its dissemination and appropriation"
(91).
My Connections:
Chartier is combining concerns about the "significative force"
of some works at the same time he considers the practices and institutions
that make them possible. Why this order? He starts with readers and the
communities they form around intellectual technologies (print in this case.)
He moves on to more clearly historicizing the Author function (AF) in our
society, how it was created and what largely political purposes it fulfills.
This is where I would suggest the additional AF of a more personal nature.
He then focuses on a form of textual dissemination, the library. Reader
=> author => library => new readerly public all connected, all
dependent on the politics of textual production.