The Future of the Book
Geoffrey Nunberg, ed.
Toward Metareading
Patrick Bazin
On Metatextuality
"Books, the centuries-old foundation of textualilty, can now be seen as
overshadowed by a metatextuality that extends progressively to the whole
complex of modes of representing the world, to all the different media,
while continuing, nevertheless, to function as a referent. It is for
this reason that the difficulty of perfecting and framing the methods
for leafing through "pages" on screen witnesses both an effort to
reconform the book as nonbook, and at the same time the book's
permanence" (153).
On Books and Hypertext
"Very unlike digitized hypertext, which simulates the complexity of
things and behaves like a game of the world, the book shrugs off all
confusion between language and world, reality and representation; it
intrinsically aims for effects of truth (of which literary fiction in particular is at bottom only the inverted double). On the whole,
the book fortifies social conversation by producing arguments" (159).
On the Risks of Hypertext
"Another risk, of which any Internet user is conscious, is that of a
nomadic roaming or surfing that has lost its bearings -- or its
correlate, confining oneself around singular, self-maintained or
self-sustained problematics. This double slippery
slopevis-à-vis the fundamentally universalist model of
the book finds an echo in postmodern relativism and can lead to a kind
of cultural tribalism. A third difficulty has to do with the possible
disqualification of "eyewitnessing" and its relation to reality (as
distinguished from what Derrida calls proof) which the book knew how to
guarantee -- by engaging, through the ethos of what was fit to be
printed, the responsibility and so to speak the reality of the author,
even if he had lied or deluded himself. On the contrary, the constant
updating in real time of an electronic magazine, such as the one with
which the IPSI Institute in Darmstadt is now experimenting, illustrates
forcefully one of hypertextuality's paradoxes: by one reckoning, the
most immediate reality bursts onto the screen; by another, it loses all
its force for lack of having been truly inscribed there. At the same
time that it explodes the limits of text, hypertextuality revives one of
the founding questions of culture: by what mediations can private
experience and collective practice enter into exchange?" (162).
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