or, the perpetual need for binding and boundaries in discourse
“You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” – Obi-Wan Kenobi
The book has not, and will not, die. But it will shift forms. This is because a book is not wood pulp glued together or something that resides exclusively in leather clad coverings. The book is not the codex, for it has been the scroll, the manuscript, and the tablet far before it opened right to left (or left to right) in convenient sequential pagination. The codex, to be clear, has always been merely an avatar or a permutation of the book idea. The book is greater than the form it takes. The book is (or ought to be) defined as an object of boundaries, which is no doubt why books must always be “bound.”
At its most abstracted, the book is very much akin to the Saussurean sign. It is everything that it is not. It is this writing and not that writing, these maps not those charts, this writer not those writers, it is these ideas and not those ones. The book has always been defined by its aspiration to be discrete and differentiated from other objects, most importantly other books. This emphasizes the book’s boundaries (both conceptually and literally) as definitive of what the book is, or what it does/is about.
A book is bound, bounded, and bound up. It is made complete physically, complete in its arguments (discursive binding if you will), and complete in its existence as a discrete object in a world of objects/things. Because it is bounded in all of these ways, readers have learned to consume it in a certain way: they enter the book expecting that it is not a intellectual black hole from which there is not escape. They expect to move through it, as sojourners perhaps, or detectives on a case. The metaphors for reading always treat the book as a subject that somehow, somewhere has limits. And inventiveness and exploration within the limits define the pleasure of reading and writing as invention and play. Roland Barthes famously advocated for the re-invention of the “readerly” as a type of play activity. Like the playing fields of a sport, the limits of books are not to their detriment, but just the opposite: the boundaries beget a marked-off space of inquiry and play. Books are their own worlds and territories as we have celebrated for hundreds of years.
Now we have been incorrectly drawn into a great debate about books defined too narrowly. We have been warned of the death of books, by people who see books only as the codex, the woodpulp tome, the paperback novel. We have been led to see books as publishers see them. In the process, we have forgotten the “book idea” – the idea of binding a discourse or several discourses together, such that they become a bounded object.
People have not stopped writing. They may write differently and in new electronic environments, but they are still fundamentally attempting to produce the same sort of semi-permanent scribblings that form the “content,” which is to say, purpose of books. Born into electronic environments, “digital” writing proves flexible and fast. It can cross massive geographic gaps quickly, and can be manipulated/adjusted/truncated/distorted/improved with equal ease. Electronic writing seems to have no boundaries. It exists in a vast web of connections and discursive vectors. Movement is so easy between electronic texts that one can become lost in them, and can lose sight of the purpose or initiative. The readers of electronic/digital writing are accustomed to be sidetracked, misdirected, and lost. Electronic writing, in short, begs for binding. Not just to arrest and preserve digital content that can be easily lost, but also to chart a path through content. To curate and select and bind material together such that it becomes a new discrete object. Electronic writing, the loosest form of the book idea, can be given more defined edges.
Which is why the world needs Anthologize now. Anthologize, a new, FREE WordPress plugin, is fundamentally about binding that which has become unbound and unbounded: the shifting electronic content of the world wide web. Anthologize was created by a handful of scholars, librarians, and archivists who were gathered for just one week in Northern Virginia to develop a tool for work in the digital humanities (full disclosure here: I was one of the them).
It is not surprising that a publication tool that makes an intervention into the scattered world of digital writing should be the conclusion of such a gathering and such a fast-paced collaborative process. In fact, it is incredibly telling and significant that at this moment in history of literary, intellectual and cultural work, twelve humanists should motivated to build a thing they would call Anthologize. Motivated in equal parts by fears over digital decay (data loss), the need for light free and flexible book publishing interfaces, and the eternal need to actually curate and bind material together into anthologies, Anthologize must be read as a celebration and not a detournment of the book idea. Indeed, even while Anthologize promises new life to electronic writing, and progresses the coming age of the ebooks and ebook reader culture, Anthologize is fundamentally about binding. It is about allowing individuals to create their own boundaries and bindings, to delimit a world that has grown overcrowded with information. It is about marking out, if only for ourselves, the boundaries of what we know, want to know, and hope to know.