The Future of the Book
Geoffrey Nunberg, ed.
The Book as Symbolic Object
Régis Debray
On the Book as Symbolic Anchor
"And it is perhaps also because the text could take the rigid form of an
architectural enclosure, be closed up into an ordered and clearly
demarcated rectangle, because it could be held and weighed in the hand,
leafed through by thumb and forefinger, be prominently displayed in its
place for all to see, become a permanent fixture, be hoarded,
incorruptible, spatially delimited that the order of books was able for
so long to provide so much emotional security. To serve as a pledge of
legitimacy and permanence, a shelter against the flight of time,
degeneration, death. Fusing material firmness and symbolic value, the
book linked persons together through its virtues as a concrete thing. It
was (under this guise) the literate person's antidepressant, his
survival insurance. It could stand in for the land no urbanite could
love, a foothold for the man at sea, a church for the miscreant" (144).
On Echos of Ancient Forms
"Perhaps in fact, the hypertext will be the ultrademocratic,
fatherless and propertyless, borderless and customs-free text, which
everyone can manipulate and which can be disseminated everywhere. But we
should note in passing that this captivating novelty, like many
post-modern innovations, has an air of déjà vu
about it, in conformity with the rule of the spiraling recurrence of the
most ancient in the form of the most new. Does not the fax bring us back
the volumen, as the audiovisual reproduces a certain secondary orality,
from before the age of printing? Does not the word-processing of text
facilitate the scholastic gloss and Alexandrian erudition? The beautiful
medieval codex, with its illuminations and margins open to the reader's
annotation, is also in a sense making its comeback, with no one likely
to raise objections. The traditional book, made of sheaves of folded
papers sewn together and bound, with back and cover, once favored the
attribution of works to their individual creators -- a rather late
development, I think, in the history of the manuscript, unknown to
Antiquity and the High Middle Ages (a text = an author). The microchip is
going to put back in circulation on our screens the hybrid, rhapsodic
object, blending applications and authors. Will the collection of
documents in the twenty-first century resemble the potpourri of
the thirteenth?" (146).
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