The sun shines, the house stands, Ike is gone .. I am wired again after what seems like a very long week.
Please can somebody give me the url of any place from which this book (Archive Fever) of Derrida’s can be read online?

Appreciate it.

Eisenstein points out that the resemblances between handwork and presswork supports the thesis that the transistion to the printing press as an instrument of mass communications was a gradual one at best and the feature of preservation was possibly its most important contribution. The removal of precious documents from vaults and locked drawers and duplicating them for all to see. The advent of the printing press simply gave rise to the fifteenth century KINKO’s.

It appears it was the impact of competition and market forces that gave rise to printings most beneficial innovations. Just like the digital revolution of today has resulted in arguably a better method of cataloging and distributing of information, the printing revolution resulted in more efficient systematic cataloging and indexing methods.

Eisenstein addresses the social and psycological consequences resulting from printing in chapter 4 including McLuhans assumption that the habit of reading to oneself diminished the use of the spoken word. Eisenstein is quick to point out that while print flourished, it didn’t eliminate the classroom lecture or the Sunday preachers lament.

It appears the spread of print did result in the evolution of an individualistic society resulting in the weakening of local community ties. No longer did the villages have to gather in the churches or town square for exposure to the latest news, as new kinds of communal gathering places began to spring up. Those fifteenth century libraries, Borders, Starbucks, and Christian Science Reading Room.

While the local ties were loosened, Eisenstein points out the that new groups sprang up as links to larger collective units were created and encouraged through the creation of these larger channels of communication.

Is this “printing revolution” merely the beginning of the communication revolution that we are continuing to experience today, and are we really more reclusive in our social habits, literary anchorite’s satisfied to withdraw within ourselves with less and less social interaction?

The book also mentions how printing actually allowed images (or symbols) to become wide spread. Before this, few symbols existed to the common person, and those that did exist were seen time and time again, becoming an easily ignored part of everyday life (stained glass windows, statues). Books began the priming of minds (that were used to listening to scripture orated) in the way of symbol; symbol is essentially a whole new language for your brain to process. In modern day America our brains are bombarded with hundreds of symbols every day (in the form of advertizing). We have minds that are trained by schooling to read and write, but are forced to think in symbol by society.

Images of various forms of attire were published in books. This likely caused fashion to ‘advance’ and spread at a speeds never before seen. The spread of fashion is generally paralleled by the spread of all other social forces (since fashion is essentially the most basic/shallow form of societal interaction).

The bad side of print is the fact that ‘great man’ theory of mankind’s forwarding to become the theory planted in the mind of the public/readers (great man in comparison to great movement theory, or ‘people’s history’ as its being called). This created the public to wish they could be authors – people wanted to create something that was timeless and influential. The internet (and the interconnectedness it has created) is finally rectifying this slant on worldview that was adopted by western culture during the print epoch.

Focusing on Ong’s claim of humanity’s growing dependence on sight in a literate culture misses the more important point, which is that literacy changed human beings’ thought processes and consciousness in a fundamental way. Eisenstein makes a similar claim in relation to printing: “Basic changes in book format might well lead to changes in thought patterns” (p.71). These changes include ways of ordering and indexing information so that more material could be managed. More interestingly, to my mind, is the effects of book publishing on how humans saw themselves. The close relationship between the book and a person’s self-perception as an individual also relates back to Ong, calling to mind his description of pre-literate people who could not separate themselves from their society. Eisenstein gives the example of Montaigne, who, she says, was the first to address this separation of self and other by showing himself as “an atypical individual and by portraying with loving care every one of his peculiarities.” By doing so he displayed the private self “for public inspection in a deliberate way for the first time (p.62).” Thus was born the personal essay, at the same time that a new kind of celebrity was initiated, as printers and publishers promoted their authors to new audiences. In this way, people began to relate to people whom they had never met, while at the same time becoming conscious of themselves as different and separate from other people.

This is interesting in itself, but also as it relates to ideas of globalization and cosmopolitanism that still get a lot of play today. Montaigne, because he could draw on more texts than his predecessors, was able to perceive greater “conflict and diversity” in the world around him. “A fuller recognition of diversity was indeed a concomitant of standardization” (p.59), as readers had access to but also had to harmonize a wide range of often contradictory information. Students had to hold in their heads differing ways of interpreting the world, and recognize the benefits and fallacies of each. New stereotypes made their way into the world—Eisenstein’s example is of illustrations of costumes worn by different people around the world, which would further contribute to a sense of individuality or otherness (p.59).

Eisenstein’s tone throughout the book is hesitant, seemingly reluctant to make sweeping statements but rather carefully guiding the reader down a middle interpretive path that doesn’t stray too far to either side. She often points to where “more attention should be paid” or “more scholarship is needed.” It might be interesting to read more about this relationship between printing and globalization, on one hand, and individuality, on the other.

I am most concerned about those who are in between, who don’t make a thoughtful decision about the internet’s value in the English classroom, but rather say “Well, this new technology is just a tool in my view. Just like any other tool, I’ll use it if it will help me with some feature of my class and discard it if learning about it and implementing it is more trouble than it’s worth.” I began to form my own opinion about this middle-of-the-road perspective when I read the following crucial statement in Chapter 8 of The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe: “One cannot treat printing as just one among many elements in a complex causal nexus, for the communications shift transformed the nature of the causal nexus itself” (308). This is the foundation of reasoning behind Eisenstein’s claim that the advent of printing must enter into discussions of all the overlapping movements/inventions that formed modernity. Printing did not simply play a role in the cultural shift in the fifteenth century—it defined the cultural shift.

Eisenstein reminds us that an innovation is only as revolutionary as the cultural context which either welcomes and uses it or neglects it and renders it obsolete. “One may agree with authorities who hold that the duplicating process which was developed in fifth-century Mainz was IN ITSELF of no more consequence than any other inanimate tool” (308). But printing was embraced, and a simple tool became a framework for learning and for thinking. (Derrida might say the frame became the thought itself.) Likewise, the internet has had a warm welcome and the present communications shift underway in our “hybrid” culture (as someone aptly called it in the last class) calls for re-definitions, re-evaluations, and re-realizations.

I can understand the fears of some instructors. Just as printing allowed scholars to “expand data pools far beyond all previous limits” (290), the internet—and not just the internet, but the capability to access the internet anytime anywhere—gives students access to overwhelming amounts of more or less valuable information. Some instructors fear this power granted to students, emphasizing the LESS valuable and not the more valuable electronic information. But I offer Eisenstein’s words about children of the printing revolution: “Students who took advantage of technical texts which served as silent instructors were less likely to defer to traditional authority and more receptive to innovative trends” (293). She goes on to write that such students “began to surpass not only their own elders but the wisdom of ancients as well” (293). This is critical thinking, the very skill that English teachers of any variety try to hone. It’s true that, just as “When technology went to press, so too did a vast backlog of occult lore, and few readers could discriminate between the two” (50), many students fall victim to information overload. But we are in the infantile stages of the communications shift, and over time instructors can form students into discriminating internet researchers.

I believe those instructors who write off the advent of mobile communications and the internet as a “tool” have not had the opportunity to consider the nature of the shift underway, nor the generation of students caught up in the shift who are not a hybrid generation, but a true digital media generation. The generation I refer to has been called Generation M (for media), Generation Y (to follow Generation X), Twixters, and the MySpace Generation. This generation of 18 to 25-year-olds are very unlike Generation X and completely unlike the Baby Boomers—they are unlike their instructors. I consider the classes of students we will have in three or four years. These adolescents will know a world of internet in every home, of libraries housing information technology firstly and books secondly, of cell phones and PDAs handed to them at age 7 or 8. To this generation of 11 to 17 year olds, digital media and the internet are not “tools” for their use—these technologies compose their consciousness. I can’t help but wonder: for those who teach upper-level English today, don’t you have to make a conscious choice? If this media is not simply a tool, just another step in the progression of technology—if it is really a cultural revolution—isn’t it our responsibility to identify the shift, learn about it, and make a conscious decision to accept the fast-approaching culture which defines the next generation?

Eisenstein’s book, encourages the view that our digital culture is in continuum with many of the things set in motion with the onset of print, not necessarily striking a death toll to print culture as many fear.

“The effects of printing seem to have exerted always unevenly, yet always continuously and cumulatively from the late 15th century on. I can find no point at which they ceased to be exerted or even began to diminish. I find much to suggest that they have persisted, with ever-augmented force, right down to the present. Recent obituaries on the Age of Gutenberg show that others disagree”. Eisenstein pg. 119

Her view of the effects of print technology already incorporate contradictory / dialectical tendencies. For example, while printing technology was a God sent invention for Western Christendom (Catholic) in its crusade against the Turks, “Protestantism surely was the first to fully exploit its potential as a mass medium”. Eisenstein pg. 165

The same technology solidifies and undermines intellectual / social structures.

What can be derived from this? That technology is neutral? However this view is misleading in that it presents the technology as merely an instrument, being utilized in the service of pre-conceived and pre-determined goals.

In actuality, it is instrumental in formulating thought and desire, not merely a ‘dumb’ tool for expression, documentation & dissemination.

In provoking “combinatory Intellectual Activity” and “combinatory social activity” (Eisenstein, page 49), the printing revolution set the stage for preservation as well as questioning and mutation of knowledge. It unleashed a permanent state of dialogue with the past and with parallel truths.

Printing “heightened awareness of distant regional boundaries”, allowing people to share maps, calenders and other spatio-temporal images. Eisenstein pg59

Is “the flattening of the world” (Thomas Freidman), really just an inevitable continuation of this first baby step in becoming aware of borders, crossing the borders and then compressing space through political, economic and cultural interventions?

Besides our perception or notion of the world, the dialectic between permanence and change, the other issue that is worth looking at is how our notions of interiority and the public are affected by the print and digital revolutions – print it seems was (by means of standardization and duplication), simultaneously supporting objectification of the world (through scientific / rational enquiry) as well as turning the light upon individual life experience, psychology – affecting poetry, novels and self-reflective literature.

Did print launch a permanent, dichotomy between subjective and objective reality? .. and how do we deal with those issues now in our persistant play with multiple realities?

In conclusion, I am rather overwhelmed by the fact that our notions and manipulations of time, space, self and other* seem to be in some sense a continuation (that includes dialectic) of the cataclysmic changes ushered by printing technology in the 15th century.
Fodder for tons of research.

* “OTHER” as summarized by Wikepedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other

A person’s definition of the ‘Other’ is part of what defines or even constitutes the self (see self (psychology), self (philosophy), and self-concept) and other phenomena and cultural units. It has been used in social science to understand the processes by which societies and groups exclude ‘Others’ who they want to subordinate or who do not fit into their society. For example, Edward Said’s book Orientalism demonstrates how this was done by western societies—particularly England and France—to ‘other’ those people in the ‘Orient’ who they wanted to control. The concept of ‘otherness’ is also integral to the understanding of identities, as people construct roles for themselves in relation to an ‘other’ as part of a fluid process of action-reaction that is not necessarily related with subjugation or stigmatization.

Much like today’s ubiquitous network, the press gave way to new thought, that the role of the educator or master teacher would become diminished. “Gifted students no longer needed to sit at the feet of a given master in order to learn a language or academic skill. Instead they could achieve mastery on their own, even by sneaking books past their tutors.”(p38) And yet a system of academic structure still exists. Like many futurists, one could fault in the direction of obsolescence of the past, as opposed to augmentation of future technology.

Most interesting to me is the role of media, or as some would term it “new media” (where this new media comes from, I don’t know— video and text have both been long in existence) in comparison of the new media produced by the press. When I began directing and editing 27 years ago, the act of creating video and film required the skills of many individual “specialists”. For example, a video edit “session” would work much like a recording session, where there would be an editor, an assistant, a graphic artist, a sound designer and an engineer. All of these skill sets have since been consigned to an editor. Eisenstein, by comparison, describes how scribal culture changed when the press was invented. “The new work of printing brought together philosophers, craftsmen, artists and many other disciplines.” (p154)

This decompartmentalization can be seen especially during the Renaissance. “The Renaissance was a period of decompartmentalization: a period which broke down the barriers that had kept things in order- but also apart- during the Middle Ages.” (p154)

The early days of printing described people who were involved in a multitude of disciplines. The role of scribe/compilator/commentator/author as defined by John Burrow in The Medieval Compendium(p95) can be compared to today’s blogger/video editor/compiler of links/commentator on the web. This role is further determined as being of a quasi-amateur status until the 18th century. (p113)

So what do we know about the role of the individual in a ubiquitous network? Like Luther’s first texts, information is abundant, and some texts stand out from others. An individual can make a mark on the network by creating a substantial (and interesting) body of work. Unlike the 16th century, where intellectual property was introduced and created value and a source of income, the network tends to ignore these values. When we dispose of intellectual property, what should replace it, and how will the media maker/content producer of the future find a source of remuneration?

We have “wide-angled, unfocused scholarship” (53) and reader interactivity at the request of publishers. Our coffee houses are full of the “‘sullen silence’ of newspaper readers” and the added clickety click of text messagers who are in conversations with what may as well be invisible partners somewhere out in the world. We’ve kept the social intrusion of the seventeenth century and somehow made it sociable. Go figure. And when we aren’t feeling all that social or we fear the consequences of our words, we still use different names.

On page 111 Eisenstein describes members of a “Republic” who preferred to use Latinate or Greek versions of their names when not using vernacular pseudonyms or complete anonymity. This is very much the way of Internet users today. We use our names when we want to, and we hide behind pseudonyms or anon tags when we don’t. Our world hasn’t changed much; we’ve just incorporated even more technology to integrate the written, print and electronic communications of our culture.

Between pages 118 and 119 Eisenstein describes the distraction of new electronic media (television and radio) from print culture. While print culture is still here, the Internet reduced the need for as many people to venture down to a library to search shelves of texts for information. Now, a great many people can just “google” something from wherever they happen to have a connection and often read what they need online. Print culture is still here, it’s just going digital. And given the speed at which computers went into business, homes and hands, this digital revolution won’t take 500 years to complete like the print revolution did.