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From Gutenberg to Gates Background Information, Chartier and Haraway On Friday, we progress from a historiographical text (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change) to two theoretical (or philosophical) readings. First published in 1992 and translated from French in 1994, Roger Chartier's book looks back to early modern European print culture and theorizes it from within the field of the history of the book. Grounded in his work as a historian of a series of eighteenth-century, inexpensive classics (sort of like the Everyman's Library of classics) called the Biblioteque Bleu, Chartier's collection of three essays asks, through the theories of well-known French philosophers, what kind of community of readers print enabled, what conceptions of an author print culture brought about, and what conceptions of organizing all of this information in libraries print fostered. The name of his book, in fact, The Order of Books, puns on The Order of Things, the English title of a book by one the philosophers whose work Chartier examines, Michel Foucault. First published in 1985, Donna Haraway's essay A Manifesto for Cyborgs analyzes culture in the late twentieth century and uses the metaphor of the cyborg to offer a political strategy for the seemingly disparate interests of socialism and feminism. The essay has undergone several reprints (in print, as well as online) and has achieved a certain cult status. (The editors of Wired magazine, for example, have printed laudatory articles about Haraway, as they have about Marshall McLuhan, whose work we will be reading soon enough.) Haraway herself publishes theoretical books and articles on the history of science, one of which was on your list of options for books to review. Like Chartier, Haraway reads through the eyes of several well-known philosophers-mostly Marxist and psychoanalytic ones-and her title, too, puns on a famous work: of course, Marx's A Communist Manifesto. Although the first reading discusses late medieval through early modern print culture, and the other discusses technical and scientific ramifications of twentieth-century culture (although it never mentions internet culture by name, the real "boom" of internet technology still being about 10 years away), both essays theorize long-lasting changes in communications cultures and speak, in interesting ways, to the texts we have read so far. I'll discuss them both in turn. The Order of Books We have been discussing Eisenstein's book in relation to social histories. De Certeau's book could be classified as a cultural history, a current vogue in historiographical scholarship the followed the social histories in fashion when Eisenstein first wrote. Cultural histories, influenced by trends in postmodern philosophy and artistic expression--many of the philosophical ideas which began by a school of French theorists in the 1960s, tend to consider what is imagined, as well as material evidence, as valid forms of study. The first essay of this book, according to Chartier's notes, is dedicated to the memory of French philosopher Michel De Certeau, whose quote on reading as poaching opens chapter one. In this chapter, he asks a similar question to that which Eisenstein asked in chapter four of her book: "in the societies of the ancien regime, how did increased circulation of printed matter transform forms of sociability, permit new modes of thought, and change people's relationship with power?" (Chartier 3). The second chapter addresses some of the same ideas of authorship that we began to discuss last week, particularly as we discussed illustrations of authors that began to appear. Chartier addresses the genesis and meaning of the concept of "authorship" in book culture, addressing, as he does, the ideas of authorship most famously written about by Michel Foucault in his essay "What Is an Author?" This essay, on reserve in Moellering, suggests that early modern authorship-taking credit for one's words-was enforced so writers could be punished for subversive ideas. Foucault's essay, in turn, plays on a famous essay by Roland Barthes (whom Updike admires) entitled "The Death of the Author" (a title that plays on Nietzche's assertion that "God is dead"), which essentially suggested that words have a significance irrelevant to the intentions of whoever strung them together. Authorship is a particularly debated concept in the history of the book. Eisenstein suggested that in medieval scribal culture, the original creator of a set of words was not even considered as an author, as were the copyists and so forth, whereas Jerome McGann, another big name in the field, has argued that authorship of books is necessarily collaborative: a process that occurs between writers, printers, booksellers, and so forth. Let me suggest one example that might be useful for when we read Hamlet. Assume that a playwright and actor called William Shakespeare pens some papers that actors use for performance. Before a version of that play comes off the press, that version might never come directly from the manuscript pages in Shakespeare's hand, as so many of the quartos of Shakespeare's plays did not. It might be rewritten down by an actor or actors in the troop who reconstruct the play by memory, and perhaps (or perhaps not) check it against a prompt-book for actors. What they performed, too, may have been altered in relation to the audience or for other reasons. At the print shop, composers and typesetters may make decisions on omitting or changing material simply to fit it on the page. Working in non-standardized English spelling, as well, they may choose spellings that imply something other than what was said in performance or originally penned by the author, and may, setting type backward and in most probably in low light, make typos as well. Before the play was even performed, too, as well as before it would have been printed, alterations may have been made with the state censor in mind. The printed quarto indeed, then, is hardly the project of Shakespeare alone. This concept is very different from the idea of print authorship as conveyed by Jay David Bolter in his comparison of print authorship to hypertextual authorship:
A good question, then, to ask throughout Chartier's book is not only "What is an author?", but also "What is a book?" Chapter three, finally, looks at conceptions of libraries-of organization and control of knowledge-and although De Certeau does not name the internet and other electronic media directory, the chapter seems to be informed by electronic resources. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" Haraway's essay, written in the mid 80s, dates to roughly the same time as Roger's Version, and addresses some of the same ideas: not only religion and technical and scientific advances, but also Reaganomics, income disparity (especially as it pertains to women, people in export-processing zones and Third-World economies, and "women of color"--a term that Haraway theorizes), and Cold War international politics. Unfamiliar as I am with the feminist science fiction she cites, the cyborgian-like images that come to my mind are the Borg from Star Trek, possibly Dr. Spock and Data from the original and the next generation series, respectively, and possibly the replicants from the film Bladerunner. Maybe you can think of better examples. At any rate, this monster-like being that brings together two antithetical concepts-human and machine-mirrors Haraway's own project of trying to meld Marxism and feminism, two fields that, at least in the 60s and 70s, began to be criticized by leaders of the women's movement as being incompatible due to a gender bias or blindness among Marxist critics. In this essay, Haraway is also working against a couple of forms of feminism popular during the mid-80s. One, often with roots in psychoanalytic theories, has come to be called "essentialism": that is, the project of identifying women's fundamental differences from men. Such differences were often defined as women, by their very nature, being more nurturing, less violent, and so forth, than men. Another form of feminism that Haraway is disputing is a jurisprudence model of feminism made popular by the legal scholar and Marxist, Catherine MacKinnon (who in the mid-80s co-authored the "Minneapolis Pornography Ordinance," a measure that did not pass, but proposed to outlaw pornography at the point of sale on the grounds that it violated women's rights.) Haraway's writing endorses technology in her metaphor of the cyborg, but is equally critical of what technology can bring about. Thus, while embracing the potential of some technological advances, Haraway avoids the rosy picture that Bill Gates (the quintessential capitalist) paints in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead: that not only is the "information superhighway" the greatest cultural shift since Gutenberg, but that it will carry users "into a new worlds of low-friction, low-overhead capitalism, in which market information will be plentiful and transaction costs low. It will be a shopper's heaven" (158). Dense, but provocative, Haraway's writing speaks in Interesting ways to both some of the questions that Eisenstein asked about evolving systems of communication, and to some of those that Birkerts, who we will soon, asks as well. There will additionally be a nice lead-in from Haraway to the book, Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy that Sarah will be reviewing for us soon. Two quick notes: 1. for information about Foucault, De Certeau, and Haraway, see the link to "related sites" on our class site. 2. Like those on Eisenstein, written responses for Monday could very well review or address a single chapter from Chartier's book. Or, of course, they could focus on Haraway. Works Cited Any asterisks denote being on reserve at Moellering Library.
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