For Thursday read the Derrida (Archive Fever pg. 1-31, “Paper, Me” & “The Book to Come”) which is on eReserve (email me if you need the password). For your comments this week, no need to try and expand Derrida’s position, just try to explain what you took him to be saying, and what perhaps you did not understand.
Update: Apparently the Preamble is not available. Email me and I will send you a copy.
Archive Fever, The Book to Come and Paper or Me, You Know… all describe terms evolving as technology comes about. It is interesting to consider how we use the language we inherit. Even the exergue in Archive Fever is written in the space between the untitled intro and the prologue. While not exactly a medal, this space is between the inner image (the argument or main text, in our case) and outer ring (or cover, here).
Derrida wrote that the question of archives is a question of inside and outside. We used to store knowledge inside our minds, inside us, to share with those whom we encountered. Then we started writing it down, putting it outside us and into archives – places where archons could find knowledge and pass it down. But now we archive things by writing them down, binding them in books, and placing them in archives. We usually use boxes now more than domiciles, but libraries still hold archives.
And what about libraries? JackieD mentions that all the words pertaining to libraries were verbs meaning to put, not nouns referring to large book houses, yet here we are. Libraries are storage; archives. And what do they store? Bound books. Yet, books, biblio, liber, come from writing paper. Not bound pages with text inside, just loose pages on which to write. So we bound the pages, added covers and still called them books. And the place we store the books we still call a library.
Now we are moving into a time when, as Derrida describes, libraries will be more a place of writing and creating knowledge than of simply going and fetching knowledge. Isn’t this a return to something close to the original Greek meaning? Or will the Internet become our library and we’ll call traditional libraries something else? (Although places of sitting down and creating content are as diverse as home, work, school and Starbucks, anymore.) But how will we (or have we already) forcibly evolve the language to integrate the digital evolution? Books will no longer be exclusively paper (e-books, audiobooks, etc.) but they won’t go exclusively digital either. “Text” is a fun term and we’ve abused it for everything from the little black characters on the screen/page to the entire work of fiction, film or philosophy. But that doesn’t do justice to the fetish that is the book – cover, pages, ink and all. A “book,” as Derrida described in such detail, is a sensual experience. But then again, we aren’t experiencing a liber when we open a cover and turn pages, so what are we experiencing when we boot up and “google” (another bastardization of language) an article on the bibliotheke?
Derridas Archive Fever: I am not getting hold of an online version of this book .. either at the UT library or elsewhere. I was under the impression it was available for donload. Can somebody help me?
Most of houston has no power – still no stores open .. I seem to be one of the lucky few both powered and wired since this morning !! yeah!
Please send url if you know it.
Beginning with “Archive Fever”, I think Derrida is simply defining the modern day term archive as having come from the Greek arkheion which was a physical address inhabited by elite citizens in authority. They were privileged to be the keepers of the literary flame, and considered to be the voice of reason when it came to interpreting the archives and defining the laws of the period. An early interpretation of “The man with the gold makes the rules”. Derrida refers to the changes in archiving as a deconstruction affecting every aspect of society.
I didn’t understand the connection to Freud until I got to his “Paper or Me, You Know” and his discussion of inhibitions, symptoms, anxiety, and how the blank sheet of paper becomes the mother’s body, at least when it’s being written on with pen and ink, I think!
I understood his connection of paper to multimedia in “Paper or Me, You Know” and his definition of the decline in the use of paper as a withdrawal rather than the death of paper. I understood his discussions on the signature and the legalities associated with signed document, electronic identifications and markers.
I understood Derrida’s description of undocumented or paperless people and his insistence on reviewing of international law and human rights, but again he talks about the impact of the new technologies affect upon Freud and psychoanalysis and the mystic writing-pad. I get the mystic writing pad just not the repeated connection to Freud.
“The Book to Come” seems pretty straight forward. The book as we know it, and then the book to come poses the question of how the book of the future will be defined. He perceives the book of the future as endless or interminable. He is quite bold in his defense of this postulate when he states “In Fact lets be serious–we know the book isn’t going to disappear.”
Now we get to “Exergue”. I don’t understand his use of the word and it’s connection to Freud. Would access to archival machines have had an impact on Freuds studies and would they have changed anything. I’m not sure if he is challenging the works of Freud or simply using psychoanalysis as an area of consideration as to the impact the new technologies (Mystic Pad) could have had on the science. The theory of psychoanalysis becomes not just a theory of the memory but a theory of the archive, as well.
Well I don’t know if I’ve ever been so confused before. Where from reading The Paper to Come and and Paper or Me I feel like I understand what is being argued yet from the way everything is described, I have to question just what exactly is being asked or argued by Derrida. In both text, he goes into the history and possible future of the book and paper both, but talks about them in a method as where it seems like they are their own entity.
Starting with The Paper to Come Derrida brings up the topic, the end of the book. Not meaning the official end of the text, but rather the end of the book as we might know it given our day and ages use of technology with computer and hard-drives. He mentions himself that where he loves the old use of writing on paper with the use of a pen, he also loves using technology like a T.V. or computer and typing on a type-writer or key-board, and making the comment as to making sure that we don’t lose ourselves in this new use of technology as to forget the original method of print and text.
In Paper or Me Derrida mentions people using pads and paper to write down and log comments and ideas people use to come up with and all I could think about was current professors using the phone to write done notes and use it to recite their ideas to others during public speakings. Through out all of this I’m relating to a lot of the arguments, yet I get lost in other parts of the papers, both of where Derrida almost seems to be describing either the book or paper a like they are our next door neighbors and we have to make sure not to lose sight of either so that they will not be lost within society or history.
Now where I will agree as I have mentioned in earlier post say from The Printing Revolution, I do tend to agree that technology has played a part in hurting society in the process of learning to read and write in our education system, but that does not mean that it has killed it. Where Derrida makes the argument that we have to watch our love for the future as to make sure that it does not kill the history of the past for the book and paper, I have to ask is our use of computers and the internet really hurting the progression of the book and paper, or are we just witnessing the next stepping stone for the world of literature and text? Has technology really hurt our future, or are we just too afraid of change to accept the next evolutionary step?
Derrida’s language is not easily accessible.
I am reading 4 files, not necessarily in the chronological order in which it was intended to be read and which a hardcopy book between my hands would perhaps have forced me to follow.
I am coping with layouts (the double page format of the scanned pdf documents) that seem unsuitable to the scrollable computer screen
All these factors make for a partially digested tract
On Archive
The etymology of the word ARCHIVE = from the Greek word “archeion” meaning the domicile of a superior magistrate – the Archon, who gathered, created, interpreted and represented the laws .The Archive is thus both a physical repository of documents and also an institutionalized symbol of authority (the patriarchive) An archive gathers, unifies, classifies, brings to order (in accordance with one authoritative source). Hetrogeneity threatens it. There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution and its interpretation.
Have Google and Wikipedia allowed us to at least partially don the role of Archons? Will more access and control over the gathering of information lead to more voice in the laws that govern us .. or is this too literal an application of Derrida’s ideas?
On Books
Derrida separates the “work” from the Codex (the gathering of a pile of pages bound together, the current form of what we generally call a book such that it can be opened, held between the hands, laid on a table etc).
Derrida does not believe that the physical book is going to disappear anytime soon. If anything he sees it further entrenched in our society due to a fetishist celebration of its distinctiveness in contrast with ubiquitously delivered electronic texts. For him, the co-existence of many loves is possible … things do not follow each other in neat chronological sequence – but overlap – example speech and writing.
However, he sees the point in electronic texts, especially from the point of view of labor and resource conservation. But this disperses the book (that traditionally bundled its content,)– dissemination that paradoxically reinvests in the book project: The world wide web as the ultimate book, in which the readers themselves become authors.
He also warns that this creates a culture of “anything goes” and opens the door to dangerous and / or inept people. Isn’t this a part of the heterogeneity that challenges old guard hegemonies?
On paper De-paperization – “is to begin with the economic rationality of a profit: a simplification and acceleration of all the procedures involved; a saving of time and space, and thus the facilitation of storage, archiving, communication, and debates beyond social and national frontiers; a hyperactive circulation of ideas, images and voices; democratization, homogenization, and universalization; immediate or transparent “globalization” – and so, it is thought, more sharing of rights, signs, knowledge and so on. But by the same token, just as many catastrophes: inflation and deregulation in the commerce of signs, invisible hegemonies and appropriations, whether of language or places.
… the modes of appropriation are becoming spectral; .. this virtualizing spectralization must now resign itself to the loss of schemata whose sedimentation seemed natural and vital to us.
Paper is essential to the centuries old schemata that constructed or instituted the experience of identifying with the self. I who can sign can recognize my name on a surface or a paper support.
I the undersigned, authenticated by my presence, in the presence of the present paper
In substituting for this, the electronic support of a numerical code, there is no doubt that these forms of “progress” are secreting a more or less muffled anxiety.
At the same time – legitimization and accreditation still depends on paper – the paperless immigrant exemplifies this dependency. But here too there are processes of technological transitions: the recording of marks of identification and signatures is computerized.”
Scanning of retinas and digital thumbprints may not provide the psychological satisfaction of a signature on paper, but they serve the same purpose by respecting and proving the body’s presence at point in time & place.
Derrida, deconstructs our pragmatic and emotional relationship with the archive, book and paper. In doing so, we neither need to write their obituaries, nor do we need to deny the inevitable changes that are occurring with the digital revolution. How we translate their functions and affordances (that our important to us) in the digital realm, those are the questions we must answer.
On Freud
I draw a blank here. I don’t even find this connection necessary to follow Derrida’s thoughts on books, paper, archives which all seem to continue the concerns begun by Ong and Eisenstein. I don’t see what Freud brings into the picture, except for equating all writing instruments and indeed all weapons with the phallus; having writing be an integral activity in psychoanalysis and turning his private home into a museum, thereby “archiving” its contents and presumably becoming even more of an authority figure in his field. I am totally ready to be educated further on this matter.
I hate to begin writing without having a single, or at least unified focus, but my response is complex.
I can’t help but to understand the concept of the exergue through my understanding of the concept of the parergon, as Derrida articulates it in his essay of the same title in The Truth in Painting. Just as the frame of a painting or the drapery on a statue are things placed by (par) the work (érgon), the exergue is out of or beyond (ex) the work. From the hard-won grasp I have of the parergon, I learned that any supplement or accessory to a work comes with its inherent problems, even before judgment of the work itself begins. The parergon is Derrida’s solution to the problem of the violence inflicted by binary oppositions and critical frameworks. Critics must allow criticism to “weigh up and bear on the frame, which is the decisive structure of what is at stake” (“Parergon” 61). There is tension between, not only the frame and the work, but the frame and what is beyond the frame. Likewise, “The archive always works, and a priori, against itself” (par. 9). The archive, given its task of recording and copying, works against memory (isn’t the goal of preservation to remember?). Also, the very concept of all-inclusive, feverish archiving works against itself, since to make content interior and A PART OF, it must exteriorize some content: “No archive without outside” (par. 10).
When Ashbery writes that “The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind / Colliding with […] its desire to communicate / Something between breaths […] so that understanding / May begin, and in doing so be undone” (“And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” lines 26-30), I begin to understand the amazing complexity of the concept of shifting communication forms. Eisenstein wrote that printing did not simply play a role in the cultural shift in the fifteenth century—it defined the cultural shift. I found it difficult to conceive of how print not only reassigned causes and effects, but also refigured entire cause and effect relationships. This depth of analysis is the type Derrida weaves. “What is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way” (“Exergue” par. 17). The stakes are high. Theoretical relationships break down and come undone. And the breakdown itself is violent. “Order is no longer assured” (“Archive Fever” par. 4).
If I had to articulate any major source of personal confusion in the reading, it would be the concept of “supports.” In “The Book to Come,” he writes “the question of the book should not be conflated with that of supports” (4). He goes on to say that the “question of the support” will be integral in his discussion of what is transforming the technology of the book. He also notes that the support is both paper and the book form, and later that a support is a “mode of reading and writing” (12). So, I wonder if I have misunderstood the concept of the exergue. I understood the exergue TO BE the archive, but the exergue is the beginning of the “violence” of the archive, and the supports are not violent in themselves. But a support is a means to delivering a work, just as the archive delivers a work. But, is a support rather a medium, just as paint and canvas, marble and wire? A medium would be different from a means.
I also wasn’t sure about the word “hypomnesic,” even after I looked up its meaning. I wasn’t sure how the context of the word in the text corresponded to the word’s meaning.
Derrida, in Paper Machine, opens with emphasis on the subtle (but key) differentiation between the meanings that ‘bibliotheca’ (or library) holds verses that of ‘book’. The root of library can be traced back to ‘a place to put books’. The word ‘books’ can be traced back to a mere statement of the substance the text was inscribed upon (liber – a type of bark). We should look at a book as the most technologically advanced system of transcribing knowledge; the library is then the most advanced system of storage for these ‘chunks of data.’ It has been surpassed – society and technology just have to play catch-up (the kindle is a good start).
On page 8 Derrida mentions that comments and feedback can exist in this new medium; feedback is the core requirement of any forward-marching evolutionary being (from atom to cell to human). The internet allows this in an immediate fashion. Feedback has, up until now, been of a purely local nature. We can now receive feedback on a blog post from (almost) anywhere on the planet; a huge leap for mankind. Our horizons have been expanded in a way that has never before been possible. He mentions on p13 that democratization and secularization occur during these advances. The internet, being a huge change, makes these truths readily apparent – Wikipedia democratizing truth (which is truer than an empirical observer as every perspective – the bombed and the bomber – get to chime in on their interpretation. Not just the BBC presenter, attempting to depict a neutral angle. I believe, given both extremes, one can arrive at a truer interpretation that given a view attempting to offer up their take on the event in as monotone a way as possible, as to not cause any bias.) Religion has been strayed from to the point of being satirized by the internet community – the flying spaghetti monster.
Page 15 mentions a marginalization of the codex. We now seek out information and browse related articles that are connected to the web page we are reading. This is a very different approach to learning. The extreme of this is a ‘stumbleupon.com’ recommendation system, where you vote articles up or down and it adjusts what you’re shown to your past tastes. This creates a very refined definition of who a person is; this is unhealthy for the person as it pigeon holes them to a new extreme. The 40% of the people voting republican or democrat are doing so out of habit. They do so without regard to the fact that to grow as a nation you have to have a party that doesn’t tax, allowing people to spend, stimulating the economy, and a party that taxes, saves money, and spends it on public good (like building libraries and homeless shelters). If either party is in office for too long, society will stagnate and perhaps crumble. Similarly, if a person is stuck in a certain pattern of existence for too long they will stagnate to some degree. The codex-less ideology of the internet is troubling. Derrida mentions a mere marginalization of it, not obsolescence. I believe him, but I think we will bounce to a codex-less mindset for a short while.
Reading Derrida made me realize how our society’s mindset towards the written word has changed in recent times. We have moved to a culture where we read a headline and judge an article (even without reading it) on that alone. The a-typical view of newspaper sellers on the street corners of a bustling city yelling ‘some sort of headline, read all about it’ comes to mind. For every 30 people that hear the vendor proclaim the headline, one person purchases the paper and reads the article (totally fictional numbers). That forces our society to see words not as contextual pieces of information, but as symbols. Derrida seems to have a way of using fairly regular words in a context that makes them matter far more than they would today (especially in a headline). Our current day headlines contain sensationalist words that have weight due to all the associations they hold. Words are processed in our minds outside of the context of the sentence; they’re instead processed within the context of our past experiences with them. The statement ‘Obama sounds like Osama’ would not have permeated society with such fever in past public mindsets. A radio host, Chip Franklin, took to the streets asking “Do you think Barak Obama poses a threat to the United States” and he got a slew of statements of ‘absolutely’ and the like (although I’m sure all the ‘What? No?’ responses where edited out). This ‘study’ shows how the contexts of the words don’t matter as much as the symbols that they bring to mind.
Towards the end of point 3, on page 18, Derrida hits upon rights and power associated with the author. Foucault brought up the idea of the author as a construct of history. The author mindset of society will dwindle in a world of wiki-style sites. Wikinews.org exists and once the entire world is connected with the internet, it will be king. Many police officers have already been fired due to YouTube videos of their misconduct being posted. A slew of perspectives will be added to events and a middle ground of truth will be reached. The historic creation of the author will indeed crumble. Unfortunately, along with it, so will the overarching ‘voice’ in an article. This perhaps brings us full ‘circle’ to where the editor is now, again, king. The editor could take a variety of perspectives and make it a naturally flowing, readable piece. Ken Wilber, Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Johnston and many more are creating a flowing narrative – a conversation – between many un-like minded individuals or movements. They are labeled as authors in this age, but perhaps in the future they will be seen as editors (once an editor held in reverence as someone who construes an overarching theme connecting many different views). Perhaps Gladwell will be footnoted as the editor of Wiki pages in the future, and be greatly respected for it.
In the last two paragraphs on page 18, Derrida asks us to look back at the future of ourselves as if it’s our past. He envisions “A history … which does not hold fast, a history that cannot be maintained, a history which is no longer held in the hand, now.”
“It no longer obeys the finger and the eye, as a book would. Might it ever have done so?”
My take on these statements would be, rather, ‘history was never truly held in the hand of a single man’ or ‘now we view history as being held in the hand of a human organism – as we are in the hand of this planet, and as it is in this universe.’ Our horizons have been widened; our blinders taken off. We are like a frog that could not have conceived of a body of water bigger than the pond it lived in; the frog then got internet and saw pictures of the ocean. And its head exploded.
Derrida is always fun to read, because I never quite know what he is going to say, save for the fact that he looks for binaries, differénce, the other,— and he frequently focuses on deconstruction.
And so it is with the book. Of the four concluding points at the end of “The Book To Come,” Derrida mentions the secondarization of the second itself (Book to Come p18), and this is what interests me the most, that binary relationship of the book to come and its opposite, a mutation, what Derrida referred to as “monstrous”. That which has no models or norms, the sudden mutations that occur.
We seem to be at a point where these mutations are already taking place. I mentioned last semester that my books have already become available as E-books from the publisher. This is both promising and troubling. On one hand, it is soothing to know that my work will be available electronically to a larger base of readers. On the other hand, that lack of substrate, of paper on which the text and images are imprinted, is missing. Were it not for proper layout of the text with relation to the images, I might ask why the publisher would retain any of the proceeds from the sale of the book, save perhaps a sales commission. After all, the text is my own, not that of the publisher. And here Derrida defines the true essence of a book, the relationship of the living organism to its environment (Book To Come p18)
Derrida describes in some detail how the face of the book changes and uses metaphor— that of a face— to describe the elements that change, much like the face of the book. It reminds me of our discussion of the title page, how it never existed in ascribed texts prior to the invention of the printing press. It seems to me that in many ways, we are reverting to a form of the book that has no title page, in which the elements are mutated, riffed without author representation, separated from the intellectual property laws of the printed book, where the essence of the book, or essences, are culled from the pages, creating a second second book, a trace of the book which is stripped from the confines of the paper substrate and removed from the biblioteche as we know it. This ongoing mutation from the original pages will continue a dispersion, but at what cost? How does the capability of the new biblioteque, the network, strip meaning or perhaps alter (mutate) the meaning of the original book, where substrate and space are no longer confining the essence of the book?
Ray Bradbury commented on his book “Fahrenheit 451″ that when he proofed later versions in the 1990s, there were over 400 changes made (by publishers, editors?) to the original text that he had written in the 1950s. When we think of the printing press, we consider it a standardization of a work, which is not always the case. The changes made to F451 show that wherever there is a human touch, even the book itself is a form of a mutation, a secondary second.
Derrida seems in many ways to equate paper with the human body. The brief history of paper, he says in “Paper or Me…”, is “tangled up with the invention of the human body and of hominization;” he repeatedly refers to “the body of paper;” and, most tellingly, in the “Exergue” he cites both printing and circumcision as modes of inscription. To him, the graphosphere includes both graphic elements like the writing pad, and natural elements like “biographical or genetico-graphical traces, with the support being a person’s body.”
Paper has shaped man’s relationship to space and time, instituting a linear way of thinking that can be questioned or challenged within its own limits, but which loses its relevance outside a culture of paper: Derrida himself says that previous typographical experiments would no longer have been interesting to him in a more technological period. Paper is a medium to which man entrusts his communication; it becomes invisible, a support or background, and thus takes on the metaphorical significance of the body, our medium for interacting with the world. Our history, the archive and what we put in it, are shaped by paper, and would not be possible without it.
Like the body, paper is ephemeral. Its moment in history is short, and we are at the end of it. At this moment, we can both feel nostalgia for paper and appreciation for its “virtues,” and be sensitive to the changes wrought by new technologies and a “paperless” world. What the withdrawal of paper means to man is no less than an altered relationship to his body, and different relations between body and soul. A multimedia, interactive environment has very different implications from those of any manifestation of paper (writing pad or book, primary or secondary). The contradictions inherent in paper, the “conversion of a contrariety…between the outside and the inside” are altered with electronic media. It remains to be seen how humans will define themselves in relation to new technology. Cultural inventions seemingly entrenched will become irrelevant or unrecognizable: history, literature, politics, and philosophy as we know it are all dependent or based on a paper culture, in both a literal and figurative sense.
On a different note, it is also interesting that paper is contiguous with legitimization, with appropriation. This is another side to the metaphor of paper as body: as a legitimating factor, documentation comes from external authority, and differentiates between guest and host, in the case of immigration, or rich and poor, or privileged and forlorn. In this sense, there is great possibility in technology for subversion and transgression—these polarizing and capitalist tendencies of paper will not be as relevant as technology moves away from the dominance of paper-oriented thinking.
A question I am left with (among many):
I wonder why Derrida’s metaphors of the body are consistently violent or painful: circumcision, tattoos, the “incision or breaking of a piece of writing”. He writes that “in this work on paper, there is a sort of wager of the body or flesh—and of the bait, that taste of flesh that a huntsman gives the dog or birds of prey.” I suspect that it goes back to the “Exergue,” to the death drive that, it seems, is also contingent on the paper culture’s external/internal contradictions. Psychoanalysis is possible only in a paper-dominated world, and with that antagonism between consciousness and unconsciousness, the relationship between man/paper/body/soul is, in his conception, a violent one. I wonder if this violence will still exist as those relationships change in a technological culture.
Gotta say, having this discussion surrounded by books , boxes and piles of papers brings such dimension to this text.