The Forms and Uses of Contemporary Books : Studying the Book as a Mass Produced Commodity and an Intimate Object

2/17/2016 TRANSFORMATIONS Journal of Media & Culture http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issues/27/06.shtml 1/15 2016 Issue No. 27 — Thing Theory, Material Culture, and Object-Oriented Ontology The Forms and Uses of Contemporary Books: Studying the Book as a Mass Produced Commodity and an Intimate Object By Hanna Kuusela The modern and contemporary institutions of literature have been unquestionably strongly tied to one material object or thing, the printed book. Even if our times are dominated by visual and digital culture and even if technological developments are supposed to bring changes to the field, the printed book has not disappeared: the dominant mode of literature is still tied to the book. Furthermore, it is not only literature which has for centuries rested on the materiality of the book, but through literacy and education, books have been closely tied to such modern ideals as freedom of expression and rational argumentation in the public sphere. According to different commentators, the book is an object, which along with print technology has significantly contributed to the emergence or the stabilisation of several modern institutions, like nation (Anderson; Eisenstein), constitutions (Johns), science (Eisenstein) and the public sphere (Habermas). Jason Epstein goes as far as to say that printing “gave birth to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the scientific and industrial revolutions, and the societies that resulted: in other words, our present world with all its wonders and woes” (xi). Despite this intertwined history of literature and books as material objects, and the importance of the printed book as a historical actor, the methods of literary studies or sociology of literature have often ignored material aspects of contemporary literature, or object-oriented methodologies, until now. The mainstream methods of literary criticism have highlighted textual aspects, or alternatively, when materiality has been discussed, it has usually been approached as a background or base structure out of which the art of literature grows. Now, the situation has, however, started to change. Drawing inspiration both from (historical) book studies and the socalled material turn in social sciences, literary scholars have shown new interest in the materiality of contemporary books. The present article discusses this turn and introduces a framework for studying contemporary literature in its full materiality. Taking an object-oriented approach to the book requires understanding its unfixed nature as a material object. The book is both one of the first massproduced commodities and a singular thing that is intimately used and reused by its readers or users. In order to take this unfixed nature of the book into account, this article suggests that books should be studied both from the perspective of their forms and of their uses. Drawing from literary poststructuralists and material culture studies, it approaches the production and the reception of books as practices that leave investigable traces in the material objects. Books change between editions, and even when they are released and circulated in tens of thousands of “identical” copies, individual readers regularly leave their marks on books, thus, using for their own ends the material affordances the books offer. Matter in Literature ISSN14443775 2/17/2016 TRANSFORMATIONS Journal of Media & Culture http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issues/27/06.shtml 2/15 Questions concerning matter and materiality have recently interested scholars across the humanities and social sciences, both in what has been called material culture studies and the posthuman or new materialist paradigms. The various theorists working within these paradigms have enabled matter to appear as an ontologically and epistemologically unavoidable topic of research. As a consequence, matter now seems to be everywhere. These emerging theories range from the ontological considerations of post-humanism and new materialism (see, for e.g., Braidotti; Coole and Frost; J. Bennett; Haraway) to more empirically oriented approaches (see, for e.g., Appadurai; Kopytoff; Hicks and Beaudry; Law and Hassard; Callon et. al.). The common aim of the different theories has been to emphasise how apparently inanimate things act on people, and are acted upon by people (Woodward 3) and how things have the capacity not only to impede the will of humans but also to act as forces with trajectories, propensities or tendencies of their own (Bennett, J. viii). The interest in materiality has been so wide that some have even referred to a material turn (Hicks), and along with more theoretical and ontological considerations, several handbooks of material culture studies have been released (see Hicks and Beaudry; Buchli; Tilley; Woodward). The current special issue of Transformations is, thus, only one example of the trend. Despite their often different approaches to the ontological questions, these various studies share an interest in objects, things, and materialities in everyday situations. Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen writes that in contrast to ontological, historical or ethical materialism, in the new approaches, “attention is paid not only to the background explanations, but also to the foreground: action and experience with materialities. Matter is not behind pure human interaction. Instead, materiality is regarded as taking part in the interaction. Human togetherness implies being together with things” (281). Accordingly, material objects can signify; they can incorporate, facilitate, assist and carry meanings. Slowly, such insights have found their way to the research on art and culture, and a growing number of visual-art and music scholars have approached art as materially supported processes (e.g., Hennion Baroque, Those Things, De Nora; de la Fuente). In the field of literary studies, matter and materiality has traditionally been on the agenda of the so-called book studies or textual scholarship, as some book historians have worked on the various physical editions, modifications and routes of historical texts (see, e.g., Myers et al.), but recently also research on contemporary books has started to incorporate material aspects. In particular, certain niche genres, such as artist books, zines, and electronic literature, have been studied in terms of their materiality (see, e.g., Hayles; Thoburn; Drucker; Mays and Thoburn), but also the materiality of contemporary popular books has started to interest scholars (Matthews and Moody; Moylan and Stiles; Mays and Thoburn). For example, the authors of Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America (1996), have attempted to “situate the material text within those webs of production, dissemination, and consumption that constitute and determine meaning in any given place and time” (Moylan and Stiles 3). In their introduction, the editors Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles write: “[W]hen we read books, we really read books – that is, we read the physicality or materiality of the book as well as and in relation to the text itself” (2). Paul Duguid has made a similar argument when suggesting that books are not “dead things” carrying preformed information but are, themselves, crucial agents and means of production (79). Equally, for example Ailsa Craig has noted that cultural studies would do well to pay more attention to the physicality of objects, like books, which are often seen as conduits of meaning rather than as constitutive of meaning (49). Finally, N. Katherine Hayles has noted that focusing “on materiality allows us to see the dynamic interactivity through which a literary work mobilizes its physical embodiment in conjunction with its verbal signifiers to construct meanings in ways that implicitly construct the user/reader as well” (131). Texts are always embodied in some materialities, and literature is best understood as the interplay between form, content and medium, as Hayles (31) suggests. However, in order to understand this interplay, we need to define more thoroughly what the materiality of the book is – and how it can be seen, approached and understood. 2/17/2016 TRANSFORMATIONS Journal of Media & Culture http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issues/27/06.shtml 3/15 Book – A Fixed Object or a Hybrid Entity? What the thingness or the materiality of the book means is, of course, not a straightforward question. The word “book” can refer both to a materially tangible parallelepiped and a textual mass or a textual content that can have different material embodiments. A book can be both a metaphysical immaterial idea and a material copy of a manuscript. “The same” book can be, and often is, released in different formats, in hardcovers and paperbacks, across decades, and in different translations. Even when going through such mutations and transformations between formats, the book is called a book; an audio book is a book, so is the e-book, although neither of them has anything to do with the printed book, made of ink and paper. The first barrier for doing research on the material culture of books is, thus, the common, and often technology oriented perception that books (or printed texts) are above all fixed and stable. For example, Elizabeth Eisenstein – in her influential book on the emergence of print culture, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe – has named fixity and stability as the essences of printing and hence of printed products. Similarly, Walter Ong has suggested that print “encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion” (132). This is the commonplace starting point for studies on printed texts: books are taken as reified and fixed objects, and printed texts are seen as fixed entities. Even those sociologists who work with such concepts as assemblages and hybrids, and have an interest in changes and mutations, have emphasized the fixed nature of printed material, rather than its ability or cultural tendency to transform. For example, one of the key theorists of actor-network theory and assemblages, John Law has suggested that the most important element coming out of the laboratory is texts, because they are “durable and extremely transportable,” “reproducible and thus highly diffusible,” and because a text “may act in many places simultaneously” (Laboratories 49). He goes as far as to say: “[p]eople may lie to us. Machines do not talk. But texts, once inscribed and diffused, cannot be changed” (Law, Laboratories 50). To a certain extent all this is true. Printed texts are transportable, if compared, for example, to buildings; they are easily reproducible when compared to diamonds; and they are durable when set side by side with scripture written in the sand. However, this perspective easily obscures the ability and tendency of printed materials to transform. Books and printed texts react to their environments; they are interpreted, appropriated, modified and used in different ways. In a word: they change. One can, thus, say that the aforementioned perspective leaves aside those aspects of printed material that cannot be taken back to technology, or at least not to printing technology. To challenge some of these presumptions, we should note how the making of a book does not end when the book comes from the print. The luxury of fixity and closure can be enjoyed only for a short moment. Just as any other forms of stability, also the fixity of books needs to be maintained, as Adrian Johns has suggested. Fixity or stability are not essential virtues of printed material. A book, so to speak, reaches outside and beyond its covers in the form of a web of texts, discussions, human reactions, uses and practices, which makes it prone to change. This is what literary poststructuralists have suggested while concentrating on the endless production of texts. The instability or relationality of texts and books inspired, for example, Roland Barthes who wrote that the “text is the very theatre of a production where the producer and reader of the text meet ---. Even when written (fixed), it does not stop working, maintaining a process of production” (36–37). For him, text is “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (Barthes 146). Another poststructuralist, Michel Foucault, on the other hand, uses the word network to describe the unfixed and relational nature of books. He points out that the “frontiers of a book are never clear-cut”, because “it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network 2/17/2016 TRANSFORMATIONS Journal of Media & Culture http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issues/27/06.shtml 4/15 ... [a] network of references” (Foucault, Archaeology 25–6). In doing so, Foucault abandons the unity and the stability of the book: The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse. (Foucault, Archaeology 26) How, then, to study this complexity, variability and relativity of books? How to find an empirical form for the old insights of literary poststructuralists? In the following, this article draws inspiration from the materially oriented approaches that highlight the changing biographies of things. One way to encounter the empirical reality of the changing books is Arjun Appadurai’s notion of the social life of things, according to which we “have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things” (5). Similarly, according to Bruno Latour, to determine the efficiency of a mechanism we should not look for its intrinsic qualities but at all the transformations it undergoes later in the hands of others (Science 258). In the same register, this article suggests, that to determine the efficiency or the meanings of a book we should look at the transformations it undergoes in the hands of its publishers, sellers, readers and users. As Latour writes, we should “consider both the succession of hands that transport a statement and the succession of transformations undergone by that statement” (Technology 106). Following from here, what is interesting in a book or a text is not only what it originally states, or what the original edition includes, but rather how it gets re-written, modified, reacted and commented on. How does the original object, the printed text (most likely between the covers), transform, and what sorts of interpretations are made of it? How is used and valorised, and what traces do these uses leave? In the following, the article introduces two perspectives to the material culture of contemporary books. In line with Appadurai’s notion that the meanings of things are inscribed in their forms, their uses and their trajectories, the article argues that books can and should be investigated both from the perspective of their forms and of their uses, in order to better map their biographies as things (Kopytoff). Forms of Books The form of a book seldom remains identical with itself or the first edition. Instead, the forms of books change at least in three common ways. First, the literary text may go through changes between editions and translations, which also has an effect on the book’s material appearance. Second, the same (or almost the same) textual content is often released in different formats or mediums; a hardcover book, for example, transforms into paperback, audio book and e-book. And third, the paratexts, such as covers and forewords, often change between editions and translations, thus, changing the material affordance of the book. In addition to such conventional changes, many contemporary bestseller books also include different add-ons or extras, such as author interviews, reading group guides, essays and advertisements. Often such changes take place when the book becomes popular or when it moves geographically and across linguistic borders. Thus, the changes also reflect movement between places, and offer the book as new, in a new place. Moylan and Stiles emphasise the importance of such transformations by suggesting that reprinted texts present fruitful case studies, given that how and why the texts have been repackaged can say much about their cultural and social uses. “Every edition of a text, every printing that adopts a different set of advertisements, every version with a different cover is a different literary object – a different configuration of the forces that shape meaning,” they write (Moylan and Stiles 6). Similarly, according to Gérard Génette, such paratexts are always thresholds to certain kinds of interpretations. This question of the threshold is demonstrated below by a small selection of diverse titles from different publishers, years and 2/17/2016 TRANSFORMATIONS Journal of Media & Culture http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issues/27/06.shtml 5/15 countries. Covers and cover images are particularly strong thresholds, because they are often the first elements of a book that a reader encounters and they have a strong role in book marketing. They are means to position a book (sometimes anew) to its assumed and often segmented target audiences (Phillips). Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, for example, invites and encourages a different kind of reading (and different kind of readers) when the cover portrays a photograph of the author (fig. 1) than when it portrays illustrated, anonymous, vagabonds (fig. 2). James Joyce’s Ulysses appears different when the front cover includes a statement “Modern Classics” (fig. 3), than when not (fig. 4). Blurbs on the covers elevate a book’s cultural value, compared to those editions of the same text that do not include blurbs. Different back cover texts offer “the same” book as different to its readers. Furthermore, the conditions of interpretation or meaning making change or take a drastically new turn, when, for example, a foreword, an author interview or a reading group guide is attached to an edition. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun sets into a new context when the English paperback editions include an “Author’s note” or her essay “In the Shadow of Biafra.” Similarly, the forces that shape the meanings of Sofi Oksanen’s novel Purge change radically when the edition includes a reading group guide with a list of recommended readings: Franz Kafka’s Trial, Khaled Hossein’s A Thousand Splendid Suns andAleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. The book could be read very differently, if the list included, for example, Maxim Gorky’s The Mother or Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poems. 2/17/2016 TRANSFORMATIONS Journal of Media & Culture http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issues/27/06.shtml 6/15 Figure 1. Cover of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (Penguin Modern Classics edition). <http://www.amazon.co.uk/On-Road-Penguin-Modern-Classics/dp/0141182679> (Accessed 7.12.2015) Figure 2. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (Signet Complete and Unabridged edition). <http://flavorwire.com/490727/the-true-story-behind-the-letter-that-inspired-kerouacs-on-theroad> (Accessed 7.12.2015) 2/17/2016 TRANSFORMATIONS Journal of Media & Culture http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issues/27/06.shtml 7/15 Figure 3. James Joyce’s Ulysses (Penguin Modern Classics edition). <http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/theoryandpractice/2014/02/james_joyce_ulysses_1921_1.html> (Accessed 7.12.2015) 2/17/2016 TRANSFORMATIONS Journal of Media & Culture http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issues/27/06.shtml 8/15 Figure 4. James Joyce’s Ulysses (Penguin). <http://www.book-4u.com/book/details/id/13> (Accessed 7.12.2015) Doing research on such different and transforming paratexts or affordances of a book can help us to investigate how the so-called reading formations get organised. A reading formation, as described by Tony Bennett, is a set of discursive determinations that organise the practice of reading, “connecting texts and readers in specific relations to one another in constituting readers as reading subjects of particular types and texts as objects-to-be-read in particular ways” (70). Understanding the role of the material affordances or the changing forms of books, such as different covers and extras, in constituting the reading formations and the objects-to-be-read, is one central function of materially oriented literary criticism. However, this does not mean that the relation between changes in the material embodiment of the book, and the new meanings or interpretations attached to it, would be simple and straightforward: even if the book offers itself to the readers in a new form, and its affordances change, the meanings produced by the reader do not necessarily change in the same direction. A changed paratext does not, in itself, offer an undisputable answer to the problem of interpretation. Readers may still read the text and its paratexts differently from each other. But when the conditions, affordances and the limitations of the book as an object change, in other words, when the actors of interaction change, the relations between the actors change accordingly. This is what actor-network theorists have suggested: actors are always dependent on each other (Callon et al.; Law and Hassard). A small change in one actor, such as a book cover, can transform the entire network of human and non-human actors, in Bennett’s words, the reading formation. Such changes also give valuable information on 2/17/2016 TRANSFORMATIONS Journal of Media & Culture http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issues/27/06.shtml 9/15 the different interpretations and valuations of the producers, such a publishers, editors, and cover designers, along with the authors. Changing covers reflect underlying assumptions about consumers, as Angus Phillips has noted in “Cover Story: Cover Design in the Marketing of Fiction”. When a book cover transforms or a reading group guide is attached, the transformations reflect changes in the relations at the producing end, for example between the text and the cover designer, or between the author and the publisher. But these changes will also constitute new effects and influence the reception in ways that organise the future readings of the book anew. Uses of Books The perspective of forms focuses mainly on the changes a book goes through in the production process, before it is printed or reprinted. Investigating uses sheds more light on what happens after a book has been printed and released. In addition to being read, a book can be used, for example, as a status symbol, under a table’s leg or as tinder. Its uses are variable, and the same book, or different books with the same form, can get used in different ways in different places and times. At one point, a specific book can be capital for a bookseller, at another point a gift to a lover. It can be both a culturally valued asset and a commodity to be sold (Miller). Igor Kopytoff and Appadurai have been interested in how things move in and out of the commodity state, and how their social lives and biographies, thus, change. Such movement is also visible in the context of books: books are very much commodities that are produced for the market and can be re-sold and bought in second-hand book stores, but the common habit of dedicating books, or attaching bookplateson them,suggests that the traditional book culture also encourages to remove books from their commodity state, to privately singularise them (Kopytoff 74–77) and to turn them into intimate objects that are supposed to be non-exchangeable. Such singularisation has taken place, for example, when a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden has been dedicated to someone named Mari with the following words: “To Mari, my nature / loving god-daughter. / Fondly, / Liisa” (fig. 5). Figure 5. Dedication in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, found in a second-hand bookstore in Helsinki, Finland. Photographed by Hanna Kuusela. The fate of this particular Walden that was found in a second-hand bookstore, and the large amount of dedicated books in second-hand bookstores, in general, however, suggest that the removal from the commodity state is often only temporary and can be subverted, so that a once