Content uploaded by David J. Gunkel
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by David J. Gunkel on Nov 20, 2014
Content may be subject to copyright.
1. On the “end of the book,” see Eugene F. Provenzo, Beyond the Gutenberg Galaxy: Mi-
crocomputers and the Emergence of Post-Typographical Culture (New York: Teachers College
Press, 1986); Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
(Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, “The End of the Book? Some
Perspectives on Media Change,” American Scholar 64:4 (1995): 541–555; Charles T.
Meadow, Ink into Bits: A Web of Converging Media (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998);
Raymond Kurzweil, “The Future of Libraries,” in CyberReader, ed. Victor J. Vitanza
277
What’s the Matter with Books?
David J. Gunkel
Northern Illinois University
Configurations, 2003, 11:277–303 © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins
University Press and the Society for Literature and Science.
Ceci tuera cela.
The question “what’s the matter with books?” may be under-
stood on multiple registers. Taken colloquially, it asks about print
technology and its product; such a query usually denotes a worry
or concern over something that has perhaps gone wrong, be-
come a problem, or deviated from accepted practices or antici-
pated outcomes. At the same time, however, the question may
also be understood in a more literal and material sense: in this
way, it inquires about printing’s matter, questioning both the
subject matter of print and the materiality of its product. This
question, which is traced in many places and in innumerable
ways, is perhaps the query most appropriate at this time, in the
era that is commonly called “the late age of print.” It especially
matters when, for example, the computer is purported to replace
the printed book as the depository and definition of human
knowledge. The question, then, is palpable at this point in time
when we read so much about the end of the book, the death of
literature, or its remediation in digital form.1
The following does not necessarily provide an answer to the
question “what’s the matter with books?” but endeavors to posi-
tion this inquiry in such a way that its polysemia resonates and
becomes material, as the jurist would say, for the subject matter
and material of books. It does so by engaging a quotation derived
from Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, “Ceci tuera cela” (This
will destroy that).2The statement is voiced by the archdeacon
Frollo and constitutes his assessment of the impact of Guten-
berg’s technological innovation: looking up from a printed book
on his table to the stone edifice of the gothic cathedral visible
through the window of his cell, Frollo laments, “alas, this will de-
stroy that.” The anecdote has been recounted several times in ex-
aminations of the history of the technology of moveable type.3
Recently, however, the episode has been employed to address an-
other form of technological transformation. Jay David Bolter’s
Writing Space, which begins with Hugo’s text, provides a good il-
lustration of this practice, if not the precedent: “Today we are liv-
ing in the late age of print. The evidence of senescence, if not se-
nility, is all around us. And as we look up from our computer
keyboards to the books on our shelves, we must ask ourselves
whether ‘will this destroy that.’”4“Destroy” is perhaps too strong
a word, and Bolter, following Hugo, is careful to delimit its mean-
ing. Obviously, the book did not raze the gothic cathedral—it
merely displaced its function as the principal mode of human ex-
pression and the repository of memory. Similarly, the computer
will not put an end to writing and the publication of books. “The
issue,” Bolter writes, “is not whether print technology will com-
278 Configurations
(Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), pp. 291–304. On the “death of literature,” see Alvin
Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990). On re-
mediation, see Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann, “Information Society and the Text: The
Predicament of Literary Culture in the Age of Electronic Communication,” Erfurt Elec-
tronic Studies in English, strategy statement no. 6 (1999), available online at http://webdoc
.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/strategy/neumann/6_st.html (accessed December 3, 2002); Jay David
Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2000); Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remedi-
ation of Print (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2001).
2. Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin Putnam,
1978), p. 187.
3. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974);
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and
Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1982).
4. Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing
(Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991), p. 2.
pletely disappear; books may long continue to be printed for cer-
tain kinds of texts and for luxury consumption. But the idea and
ideal of the book will change: print will no longer define the or-
ganization and presentation of knowledge, as it has for the past
five centuries.”5
Questioning whether the computer will destroy or displace the
book is not something that is unique to Bolter’s Writing Space. In
fact, Father Frollo’s apocalyptic statement has been invoked, in
one way or another, in virtually every publication addressing
computers and the fate of print technology and culture. As Geof-
frey Nunberg characterizes it, “no conference or collection of es-
says on the future of the book would be complete without some-
one citing these words.”6The shelves of libraries and bookstores,
in fact, are now crowded with books that investigate whether the
computer will destroy or replace print. A brief review of titles
makes this immediately evident: Sven Birkerts’s Gutenberg Elegies,
Eugene Provenzo’s Beyond the Gutenberg Galaxy, Nicholas Negro-
ponte’s Being Digital, James O’Donnell’s Avatars of the Word, Alvin
Kernan’s Death of Literature, George Landow’s Hypertext, Frank
Ogden’s Last Book You Will Ever Read, Charles Meadow’s Ink into
Bits, Roger Chartier’s Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and
Audiences from Codex to Computer, and so on. My examination of
this matter will not, at least directly, engage the particulars in-
volved in this transformation of information technology. I will
not ask or attempt to address the question, “will the computer
destroy the book?” I will not even assess whether this alteration
is beneficial or detrimental. These may yet be important and fe-
cund avenues of investigation, but I am, instead, interested in a
much more mundane and materialistic question. As we look up
from our computer keyboards to the books on our shelves, the
question is not “will this destroy that?” but, why do so many of
the books ask or address this question? What does it mean to ex-
amine this matter in a book? And how do these publications ex-
plain, manage, and contend with the problems and incongruities
this material necessarily entails? Such an inquiry is not con-
cerned with the equipment and exigencies of technology per se:
its object is neither the hardware and software of computers nor
the intricacies of print. Instead, it is, following the example of
Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, interested in how
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 279
5. Ibid.
6. Geoffrey Nunberg, introduction to The Future of the Book, ed. idem (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1996), p. 10.
these so-called “post-print” technologies have come to inscribe
themselves in the paper of books7and, more importantly, what
they do to contend with this matter.
The Paradox of a Book
One of the ironies of our culture’s fascination with virtual technologies is its
fondness for consuming books and articles that proclaim the death of print cul-
ture—or its disappearance into the matrix.8
Publications addressing computer technology and the fate of
print culture, whether celebrating the utopian possibilities of a
new technology or bemoaning the passing of a rich tradition, are
involved in a curious, if not contradictory, situation: there is a
disjunction between what these books state about their subject
matter and the material in which these statements appear. This
tension is evident in many publications that treat the develop-
ment of computer technology and the fate of print media. In
some cases, it is explicitly identified as such. Nicholas Negro-
ponte’s Being Digital, for example, argues that we are witnessing a
revolutionary change in the way information is created, stored,
and distributed. Until recently, information was produced, accu-
mulated, and exchanged solely in the form of atoms—in the ma-
terial of books, magazines, newspapers, videocassettes, and com-
pact disks. This situation, Negroponte asserts, is being irrevocably
altered by the rapid development of digital technology and com-
puter networks: information now takes the form of immaterial
bits of digital data that are circulated at the speed of light. Con-
sequently, what the book states about the exciting new culture
and economy of bits is abraded by the fact that this information
has been delivered in the slow and outdated form of atoms. Ne-
groponte calls this friction “the paradox of a book,” and he ad-
dresses it directly in the preface: “So why an old-fashioned book,
Negroponte, especially one without a single illustration? Why is
Vintage shipping Being Digital as atoms instead of bits, when
these pages . . . can be so easily rendered into digital form, from
whence they came?”9
280 Configurations
7. Friedrich A. Kittler, Film, Gramophone, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. xl.
8. Robert Markley, “Introduction: History, Theory, and Virtual Reality,” in Virtual Re-
alities and Their Discontents, ed. idem (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996), p. 1.
9. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 7.
Vilém Flusser describes a similar paradox operative in his ex-
amination of the future of writing. Flusser’s book, called simply
Die Schrift, begins with the stunning proclamation that “writing,
in the sense of the lining-up of letters and other writing signs,
seems to have no future or almost none.” The investigation of
this matter, Flusser admits, would require a “voluminous book.”
“The only catch,” he adds, “is that such a book would be a
book.”10 Likewise Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen, in the Telewrit-
ing section of Imagologies, identify and question a cascade of
paradoxes that befall the subject matter of their undertaking and
the material in which it necessarily appears (Fig. 1). This passage,
although recorded in a book, clearly attempts to simulate the
form of an email message sent from Taylor to Saarinen. This is in-
dicated not only by the personal address with which the text be-
gins but also by the monospaced font that is emblematic of the
ASCII character set used in computer-mediated communication.
In this printed rendition of an email message, Taylor deliberately
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 281
10. Vilém Flusser, Die Schrift: Hat Schreiben Zukunft? (Göttingen: Immatrix, 1989), p. 1.
Figure 1. Taylor and Saarinen’s reflection on the paradoxes encountered in the material of
their project. From Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, Imagologies: Media Philosophy (New
York: Routledge, 1994), “Telewriting,” p. 5.
calls attention to the paradoxical problems that immediately
confront Imagologies. In writing a book about electronic text that
is critical of print technology, the subject matter seems to be op-
posed to the material in which it appears. The alternative, Taylor
suggests, would be to abandon print altogether and publish an
electronic text. This option, however, is not currently feasible.
Taylor recognizes, on the one hand, that the presently available
technology for accessing electronic text remains limited and
cumbersome and, on the other hand, that there is still a sizable
audience committed to print. The dilemma facing any project
addressing computer technology and the fate of print culture is
that one currently finds oneself in the middle of a technological
transformation: the printed book is already on the way out but
not quite gone, and the new forms of electronic text are not yet
conveniently available. Writing during this Zwischenzeit requires
that one engage in seemingly contradictory activities, employing
print to address a technology that surpasses it and renders it ef-
fectively obsolete. Similar forms of critical self-reflection are situ-
ated at the beginning of Michael Heim’s Electric Language, David
Bell’s Introduction to Cyberculture, and Peter Lunenfeld’s Digital
Dialectic.11
Books that consider the paradox of a book or question the
irony of publishing books about technologies that challenge the
dominance of print are, in the words of Frank Hartmann, “con-
scious of their own form of presentation.”12 In other cases, pub-
lications are not “conscious” of this matter and the tension
between the book’s subject matter and its material is never iden-
282 Configurations
11. For Michael Heim, in Electric Language (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1999), a philosophical study of word processing, “there is an irony in reflecting on dig-
ital writing in a publishing medium that is still committed . . . to the preservation and
maintenance of writing in printed books in a culture where books are still a major
source for the exchange of information and ideas” (pp. 13–14). David Bell begins An In-
troduction to Cybercultures (New York: Routledge, 2001) by identifying the same conflict:
“Sitting here, at my computer, pondering how to start this book, how to introduce my
own ‘walkabout’ in cyberspace, I find myself struggling. Maybe it’s because I’ve just
been reading and writing about hyperlinks and the web as text—as text, moreover, that
is open and infinite, that has no beginning or end. But a book is still a linear thing, de-
cidedly non-hypertexty. . . . So I have to abide by the logic of the book, even if it seems
increasingly contradictory in the digital age to do so” (p. 1). And Peter Lunenfeld finds
the introduction to his anthology The Digital Dialectic (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2000) to be “as appropriate a place as any to deal with the inevitable question: ‘Why
publish a book dealing with the culture of an era that has supposedly transcended the
printed page?’” (p. xx).
12. Frank Hartmann, Cyber.Philosophy: Medientheoretische Auslotungen (Vienna: Pas-
sagen, 1999), p. 31.
tified as such. In these situations, the disjunction becomes evi-
dent only in the course of a reading that exposes and demon-
strates the discrepancy. A segment of Michael Benedikt’s intro-
duction to Cyberspace: First Steps provides adequate material:
“Cyberspace,” he writes, is
the realm of pure information, filling like a lake, siphoning the jangle of mes-
sages transfiguring the physical world, decontaminating the natural and ur-
ban landscapes, redeeming them, saving them from the chain-dragging bull-
dozers of the paper industry, from the diesel smoke of courier and post office
trucks, from the jet fumes and clogged airports . . . from all the inefficiencies,
pollutions (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to the
process of moving information attached to things—from paper to brains—
across, over, and under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than
letting it fly free in the soft hail of electrons in cyberspace.13
According to Benedikt, cyberspace comprises a mode of pure in-
formation exchange that is uncorrupted by the various ineffi-
ciencies, pollutants, and contaminants of ink and paper. This
statement, however, is nevertheless communicated through the
mediation of the very corruption it criticizes. Nowhere does
Benedikt confront or even identify this tension whereby the in-
formation that is presented is already at variance with and op-
posed to the means of its presentation. Because the publication is
not “conscious of its own mode of presentation,” this difficulty
becomes evident only through a reading that attends to the ten-
sion between what the text explicitly states and the material it
employs to make this statement.14
Books addressing new forms of information technology and
the future of print are involved in what appear to be contradic-
tory matters. What is stated in these books about the limitations,
obsolescence, or even termination of print is opposed by the ma-
terial in which these statements have been created and distrib-
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 283
13. Michael Benedikt, introduction to Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. idem (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 3.
14. This mode of “reading” is indebted to the practice of deconstruction. As character-
ized by Christopher Norris in Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (New York: Methuen,
1982), “deconstruction is the vigilant seeking-out of those ‘aporias,’ blind spots or mo-
ments of self-contradiction where a text involuntarily betrays the tension between
rhetoric and logic, between what it manifestly means to say and what it is nonetheless
constrained to mean” (p. 1). For more on deconstruction, see Jacques Derrida, Of Gram-
matology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976); Briankle Chang, Deconstructing Communication (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996); David J. Gunkel, “Deconstruction for Dummies,” in idem,
Hacking Cyberspace (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001), pp. 201–205.
uted. In some instances, the conflict is explicitly identified as
such and termed a paradox, an irony, or a contradiction; in oth-
ers, it is not identified. In either case, what is the matter with
books is that the proclaimed “death of the book,” which is the
subject matter of so many publications in the so-called late age of
print, appears to be contrary to the very material in which these
claims have been made. Whether the computer will, following
the pronouncement of Hugo’s archdeacon, destroy the book is a
question that is literally put in question by the seemingly inces-
sant appearance of this material in books. Consequently, it
would, on the one hand, be impetuous to decide that these pub-
lications simply condemn or denounce print: to do so would, in-
deed, be contradictory. On the other hand, it would be just as
careless to discount these books as contradictory: to do so would,
in fact, be impetuous. Whereas the former does not make
enough of the tension between subject matter and material, the
latter makes too much of it. In either case, the disjunction is writ-
ten off as immaterial.
What is needed, therefore, is another mode of inquiry, one
that does not dismiss but is attentive to the intricacies of this cu-
rious situation. Jacques Derrida’s examination of this matter in
Plato’s Phaedrus provides useful direction. In a procedure that is
structurally similar to the ones we are concerned with here, Plato
indicts writing in writing. Derrida not only rejects the simple in-
terpretation—namely, that Plato condemns writing—as insensi-
tive, but also resists the tendency to judge Plato’s writing as
merely contradictory. Instead, he asks what institutes and legis-
lates this tension that is commonly identified as “contradictory”:
“What law governs this ‘contradiction,’ this opposition to itself
of what is said against writing, of a dictum that pronounces itself
against itself as soon as it finds its way into writing, as soon as it
writes down its self-identity and carries away what is proper to it
against this ground of writing?”15 The critical issue, then, is not
whether there is a contradiction between the subject matter and
the material of books addressing computer technology and the
fate of print. The question is how have theses books understood,
explained, and/or managed this tension that cannot help but ap-
pear to be contradictory? What regulates and justifies these ex-
planations and maneuvers? And what does this indicate about
computer technology, the book, and the terms of their relation-
ship?
284 Configurations
15. Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), p. 158.
Signs of Print
It is not surprising that this is a book and not a computer program.16
Books addressing computer technology and/or the future of the
book are involved in what Negroponte terms “the paradox of a
book.” What these publications state about their subject matter
is all too often inconsistent with the material in which these
statements have been made. This apparent “contradiction” is not
an accidental or contingent matter: it is programmed and regu-
lated by the classically determined structure of the sign. First,
whether it is determined in the course of a metaphysics, the sci-
ence of linguistics or semiotics, or in what is commonly called,
perhaps incorrectly, “everyday language,” a sign is always the
sign of something. “The signification ‘sign,’” Derrida writes in
“Structure, Sign, and Play,” “has always been understood and de-
termined, in its meaning, as sign-of, a signifier referring to a sig-
nified, a signifier different from its signified.”17 A sign, in order to
be a sign, indicates something else. Accordingly, one distin-
guishes the signifier from the signified. The signifier indicates or
points to the signified, but it remains differentiated from the sig-
nified. In explaining this, Derrida’s sentence is already involved
in performing what is described. The word “sign” (in quotation
marks) is employed to indicate and explain this form of indica-
tion. “Sign” is utilized as a signifier of the structure of significa-
tion. This structure, although marked with different names in
different contexts, remains remarkably consistent from Aristotle
to, at least, Charles Sanders Peirce. In De interpretatione, Aristotle
distinguishes spoken and written signs from the things to which
they refer: “Spoken words are the signs [σηµεια] of mental expe-
rience and written words are the signs of spoken words. Just as all
men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same
speech sounds, but the mental experiences, of which these are
the primary signs [σηµεια πρωτοζ] are the same for all, as also are
those things of which our experiences are the images.”18 For
Peirce, the founder of the American tradition of semiotics, the
sign is differentiated from the object it designates: “A sign is
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 285
16. Rob Wittig, Invisible Rendezvous: Connection and Collaboration in the New Landscape
of Electronic Writing (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 9.
17. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978), p. 281.
18. Aristotle, De interpretatione, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. and trans. Richard
McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1.16a3.
something which stands to somebody for something in some re-
spect or capacity . . . the sign stands for something, its object.”19
Consequently, despite variations in terminology—what one
might call, according to the logic described here, different “sig-
nifiers”—the structure of signification that is indicated remains
remarkably consistent.
Second, in referring to something else, the sign takes place by
taking the place of another. “The sign,” Derrida explains in the
essay Différance, “is usually said to be put in the place of the
thing itself, the present thing, ‘thing’ here standing equally for
meaning or referent. The sign represents the present in its ab-
sence. It takes the place of the present. When we cannot grasp or
show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the
present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the de-
tour of the sign.”20 As the sign of something, a sign is commonly
understood as a kind of delegate of or substitute for something
else. It is put in the place of something, when that thing is un-
able to be present as such. It is a detour that becomes necessary
when something that should be present remains, for whatever
reason, absent or inaccessible. The sign re-presents the present
when it is not present. In this way, the classically determined
structure of the sign constitutes what Derrida calls “deferred pres-
ence,” defer being understood in the double sense of “to delegate
to something else” and “to postpone it.” The sign defers to some-
thing else in its deferred presence.
Finally, defined as a form of deferred presence, the sign is situ-
ated in the interval separating two presents. “This structure,”
Derrida continues,
presupposes that the sign, which defers presence, is conceivable only on the
basis of the presence that it defers and moving toward the deferred presence
that it aims to reappropriate. According to this classical semiology, the substi-
tution of the sign for the thing itself is both secondary and provisional: sec-
ondary due to an original and lost presence from which the sign thus derives;
provisional as concerns this final and missing presence toward which the sign
in this sense is a movement of mediation.”21
286 Configurations
19. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 2, ed.
Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932),
p. 228.
20. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), p. 9.
21. Ibid.
A sign, as Geoffrey Bennington succinctly describes it, “stands be-
tween two presents.”22 On the one hand, a sign, as the surrogate
of something else, is possible only on the basis of an originally
present thing from which it has been derived and to which it de-
fers. On the other hand, a sign functions as a kind of promissory
note, pointing toward the eventual reappropriation and future
presentation of this now-absent and deferred thing. Situated in
the interval between something that was but is no longer and the
promise of something that is not yet, a sign is considered to be
both secondary and provisional. It is secondary, because it is de-
rived from and defers to an original presence. It is provisional,
because it stands in for something for the time being, promising
the presence of that which is now absent.
It is this “classical semiology” that has been employed to ex-
plain and justify the paradox of a book. In the first edition of
Writing Space, for example, Jay David Bolter addresses this matter
in one concise sentence, explicating what many books leave un-
explained: “This printed book can be about, but cannot be, an
electronic book.”23 The printed book, Writing Space, is concerned
with or refers to an electronic book but necessarily remains oth-
erwise than an electronic book. The print publication can char-
acterize, explain, and even question the features, structure, and
function of the electronic book, but it clearly is not that which it
indicates. Understood in this way, Writing Space, quite literally,
stands between two presents. On the one hand, the printed book
has been derived from an original hypertext that was present
only in the mind of the author. The first line of Bolter’s book
refers to this original but now absent hypertext: “Because the
subject of this printed book is the coming of the electronic book,
I have found it particularly difficult to organize my text in an ap-
propriate manner—appropriate, that is, to the printed page. In
my mind the argument kept trying to cast itself intertextually or
‘hypertextually.’”24 The printed book, Bolter tells us, is a derived
and highly constrained manifestation of what had originally pre-
sented itself in hypertextual form. The book stands in for this
original hypertext that could not present itself as itself because of
the demands and requirements of print. On the other hand,
Writing Space is also a promissory note, pointing to a hypertext
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 287
22. Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993),
p. 24.
23. Bolter, Writing Space (1991) (above, n. 4), p. x.
24. Ibid., p. ix.
that is not yet, but may be, present. The last page of the book ad-
dresses this matter directly:
At the end of this printed book, the reader has the opportunity to begin
again—by working through the text on a computer diskette that can be ob-
tained by sending in the order form enclosed in the book. The diskette, which
runs on Macintosh computers, contains a hypertextual rewriting of this book.
The hypertext shadows the printed version, presenting paragraphs that appear
in print and offering hypertextual notes that expand particular ideas. These
elaborations could not be included in the printed version because of limited
space or because a particular digression did not seem appropriate to the lin-
earity of print.25
Writing Space ends by pointing the reader to the electronic text
that the book indicates but could not be. The printed text, there-
fore, not only refers to an absent hypertext that existed in the
mind of the author, but also promises a hypertext that can, at the
end of the book, be made present for an additional $9.95 plus
$2.00 shipping and handling (Fig. 2). In describing his publica-
tion in this fashion, Bolter, whether he explicitly recognizes it or
not, defines Writing Space in accordance with the classically de-
termined structure of the sign: he distinguishes a signifier, the
printed book, from its signified, an electronic book, and he situ-
ates it in the interval between two presents, a hypertext that was
but now is not and a hypertext that is not currently present but
will be.
This sign structure, although applied to a different object, is re-
iterated in the second edition of Writing Space. The new edition,
which is shorter than the first by some 10,000 words, recasts the
argument of the original publication in order to take into ac-
count changes that have occurred in “the writing space offered
by electronic technology.”26 “Those changes,” as Bolter points
out in the new preface, “are due almost entirely to the develop-
ment of the World Wide Web,” which now provides the defini-
tion and privileged example of hypertext.27 In reworking Writing
Space to take the Web into account, Bolter revises both the pref-
ace and introduction and concludes by pointing the reader not
to a diskette, containing a “stand-alone hypertext,” but to a
website, which incidentally does not yet exist at the published
URL (http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~bolter/writingspace/). In this Web-
288 Configurations
25. Ibid., p. 240.
26. Bolter, Writing Space (2001) (above, n. 1), p. xi.
27. Ibid.
oriented remix, the subject matter of the printed book is not the
electronic book, but the remediation of print that is effected by
digital technology. This shift in the object of the investigation—
a shift that could be characterized as a change from a nominal to
a verbal object—is announced by the text’s new subtitle, “Com-
puters, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print.” As Bolter de-
scribes it, “this edition of Writing Space is meant . . . to show how
hypertext and other forms of electronic writing refashion or ‘re-
mediate’ the forms and genres of print.”28 Likewise, the website,
referenced at the end of the book, is described as remediating the
book itself: “If the hypertext diskette for the first edition was
meant to provide a shadow text, a metaphoric replacement of
the printed text, the Web site is instead an extension, and a re-
mediation of the printed text.”29 The concept of remediation, as
defined by Bolter, is a remarkable reiteration of Marshall Mc-
Luhan’s understanding of the process of technological trans-
formation. According to McLuhan, a new medium does not sim-
ply replace an old medium; the content of any new medium is
the old medium it is said to be replacing.30 Likewise, “remedia-
tion” describes the shift from one form of information tech-
nology to another, “in the sense that a newer medium takes the
place of an older one, borrowing and reorganizing the character-
istics of the writing in the older medium and reformulating its
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 289
28. Ibid., p. xii.
29. Ibid., p. 214.
30. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1995), p. 8.
Figure 2. The order form included with the first edition of Writing Space (1991).
cultural space.”31 Consequently, the goal of the second edition of
Writing Space is to describe the remediation of print by electronic
technology, and the website that is referenced at the end of the
book provides an example of this remediation, performing what
is indicated. This reformulation of Writing Space, or what one
might be tempted to call its remediation, still operates according
to the classically determined structure of the sign: the printed
text is about the remediation of print by digital media. In being
about the process of remediation, the book not only refers to
something else but stands between two presents: it refers to a re-
mediation of print that is already under way in the technology of
the World Wide Web, and it anticipates a website (which seems
to be endlessly postponed) that remediates the printed book that
presents this information. In occupying the interval between
these two remediations, Writing Space is a sign of the remediation
of print in print.
In defining both editions of Writing Space in accordance with
the classically determined structure of the sign, Bolter effectively
circumvents the complications inherent in the “paradox of a
book” and avoids the potential charge of self-contradiction. In
distinguishing signifier from signified, the subject matter to
which the book refers is detached and insulated from the mate-
rial in which it appears. And in occupying the interval between
two presents, or what Bolter calls in the first edition “this period
of transition,”32 the printed book is and remains effectively im-
material. In providing an account of this matter, Bolter explicates
what appears to be obvious and virtually beyond question:
whether it is explicitly demarcated in a statement like “this book
is about . . .” or remains implicit in the course of its undertaking,
a book is about something. In being about, it defers and refers to
something else. And in being referred elsewhere, the material of
the book is considered to be secondary and provisional: it does
not and should not matter, or, if it matters, it does not matter
much; what is of primary and lasting importance is what the
book indicates about its subject matter. Accordingly, the material
of the book recedes from view and becomes virtually transparent.
In fact, the more transparent the signifier is, the better it func-
tions as the delegate of the signified. In Remediation, a book coau-
thored with Richard Grusin, Bolter describes the features of this
kind of transparent intermediary: “A transparent interface would
290 Configurations
31. Bolter, Writing Space (2001) (above, n. 1), p. 23.
32. Bolter, Writing Space (1991) (above, n. 4), p. ix.
be one that erases itself, so that the user is no longer aware of
confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate rela-
tionship to the contents of that medium.”33 This transparency
through deliberate self-erasure has also been the ideal of the ideal
book. “The purpose of the book,” Mark Taylor writes in Erring, “is
to render present the discourse of the world by bringing about
the absolute proximity or perfect transparency of object to sub-
ject. Though not always obvious, this aim implies the self-
negation of the book. In the course of approximating its goal, the
book inscribes a paradoxical ‘progression’ toward its own self-
effacement.”34 It is because of this programmed autoerasure and re-
sulting transparency that so many books about Virtual Reality, cy-
berspace, the Internet, and computer technology not only ignore
the material of print but say little or nothing about this process. As
the means of providing information about something else, the
actual material of these books is effectively invalidated, taken for
granted, and not made the explicit object of investigation.
There are, of course, exceptions to this programmed trans-
parency—books where the structure of signification becomes, in
one way or another, increasingly opaque and questionable. In
these cases, the issue is explicitly identified and described in the
course of handling the “paradox of a book.” Negroponte, for ex-
ample, not only makes explicit identification of the paradox but
supplies several responses to the question “why an old-fashioned
book?”:
First there are just not enough digital media in the hands of executives, politi-
cians, parents, and all those who most need to understand this radical new
culture. Even where computers are omnipresent, the current interface is prim-
itive—clumsy at best, and hardly something with which you might wish to
curl up in bed. A second reason, is my monthly column in Wired magazine.
The rapid and astonishing success of Wired has shown that there is a large au-
dience for information about digital life-styles and people, not just theory and
equipment. I received so much thoughtful feedback from my (text only) col-
umn that I decided to repurpose many of the early themes, because a great
deal has changed even in the short time since those stories were written.35
The principal reason why Being Digital is a book and not a com-
puter program or multimedia presentation is that, despite every-
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 291
33. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation (above, n. 1), p. 24.
34. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), p. 82.
35. Negroponte, Being Digital (above, n. 9), p. 7.
thing that is stated about the advantages of being digital, there
are at least two problems with digital technology. On the one
hand, it is scarce; there simply is not enough of it to go around.
Although constituting the foundation of a new culture, the tech-
nology that Negroponte considers is, in his opinion, not yet
widely available to the individuals who most need to understand
it. On the other hand, even when the technology is available, it
is not easy to use: the interface, which is a combination of both
hardware and software elements, is inconvenient, cumbersome,
and certainly not user-friendly. Print, by contrast, not only is
widely available and easy to use but has, as is evidenced by the
remarkable success of magazines like Wired, a considerable and
attentive audience. Even though digital technology marks the
end of the circulation of information in the form of “dead-tree”
atoms, magazines and books persist; they remain popular and are
not yet passé. Being Digital is an old-fashioned book, because (1)
digital technology is not able to present itself as such: it either is
not present or, if present, is ostensibly inaccessible; and (2) print
remains accessible, convenient, and not yet obsolete. It is be-
cause digital technology is not yet able to present itself as such
that Negroponte has recourse to printed signs. These signs,
which are still widely available and popular, are employed to
stand in for this technology that remains absent or inaccessible.
The printed book, therefore, takes the place of that which is not,
at the present, able to be present, re-presenting what should be
present in its absence.
In this way, Being Digital stands between two presents. On the
one hand, the descriptions of digital technology that are pro-
vided in the book have, it is assumed, been derived from an origi-
nal encounter with the things that are represented in the text.
On the other hand, this technology, although not currently pres-
ent, will be present and widely available in the near future. In Be-
ing Digital, this situation is substantiated and authorized by the
figure of the author. As Douglas Adams succinctly describes it in
an endorsement for the book, “Nicholas Negroponte writes
about the future with the authority of someone who has spent a
lot of time there.” What authorizes Negroponte to make signs of
a not-yet-available technology is that he has had access to it. Dig-
ital technologies, although not currently available to everyone,
have at least been made present to Negroponte, who has either
participated in their development or experienced them firsthand
at places like MIT’s media laboratory. Without this unique access
to technology, his signs would be nothing but conjecture and
292 Configurations
groundless speculation—a kind of science fiction. Likewise, the
technology he describes in the book will not always be absent; its
presentation is merely delayed. It either is just beginning to be
made available or will be available at some point in the future.
Consequently, the representations provided in Being Digital are
the result of and authorized by a previous encounter with what
will be the future. This situation is neither particularly strange
nor disturbing; it is nothing less than the temporality of the sign.
The “paradox of a book” is explained, if not resolved, by en-
listing the classically determined structure of the sign. In being
about computers and new technology, the book is understood as
a surrogate for something else from which it is originally derived
and to which it ultimately refers. The printed signifier, therefore,
is considered to be both secondary and provisional in relation to
the primacy of its signified. And for this reason, the tension be-
tween the book’s material and its subject matter is rendered ef-
fectively immaterial. There is, however, at least one difficulty
with this explanation. Critiques of this classical semiology—from
the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure to
that of Umberto Eco, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida—have
demonstrated that this formulation of the sign is a metaphysical
fantasy. Most notably, signs do not refer to something that tran-
scends and exists outside the order of signs. In fact, signs refer
only to other signs. Bolter explains this by employing the famil-
iar example of the dictionary:
For the dictionary has always been the classic example of the semiotic prin-
ciple that signs refer only to other signs. . . . We can only define a sign in terms
of other signs of the same nature. This lesson is known to every child who dis-
covers that fundamental paradox of the dictionary: that if you do not know
what some words mean you can never use the dictionary to learn what other
words mean. The definition of any word, if pursued far enough through the
dictionary, will lead you in circles. This paradox is the foundation of semi-
otics. A sign system is a set of rules for relating elements. The rules are arbi-
trary, and the system they generate is self-contained. There is no way to get
“outside” the system to the world represented, because, as in the dictionary,
signs can only lead you elsewhere in the same system.36
According to this “semiotic principle,” signs do not refer to
things that exist outside the system of signs; signs refer to other
signs. The dictionary provides the classic illustration: in a dictio-
nary, words are defined by other words. Consequently, one re-
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 293
36. Bolter, Writing Space (1991) (above, n. 4), p. 197.
mains inside the system of linguistic signifiers and never gets
outside language to the referent or what semioticians call the
“transcendental signified.”37 For Bolter, this formulation is not
merely a theoretical possibility—it is exemplified in and embod-
ied by the technology of computer-based hypertext:
The new view of signs is embodied unambiguously in electronic hypertext.
Here the writer and reader know that there is no transcendence, because they
know that the topical elements they create are arbitrary sequences of bits
made meaningful only by their interconnecting links. . . . The fact that elec-
tronic signs only refer to other signs is the fundamental characteristic of the
medium, made apparent in every act of electronic writing. . . . Electronic read-
ers and writers have finally arrived at the land promised (or threatened) by
post-modern theory for two decades: the world of pure signs. While tradi-
tional humanists and deconstructionists have been battling over the arbitrary,
self-referential character of writing, computer specialists, oblivious to this
struggle, have been building a world of electronic signs in which the battle is
over.38
According to Bolter, the critique of classical semiology materi-
alizes in electronic hypertext. That is, hypertext demonstrates the
seemingly infinite self-referential character of the sign that has
been espoused in recent theory. This insight, Bolter argues, is un-
mistakably evident in every act of electronic writing. Mark
Amerika’s Hypertextual Consciousness, for instance, “a companion
theory guide” to his award-winning Grammatron, provides an il-
lustration of Bolter’s position. Hypertextual Consciousness is
unique in that it presents hypertext theory in the form of hyper-
text. Unlike Landow’s Hypertext, Richard Lanham’s Electric Word,
or even Bolter’s Writing Space, Amerika’s examination of hyper-
text is situated in and takes place as hypertext—“Not,” Amerika
points out, “because its words can’t be printed and bound by tra-
ditional book-contained media,”39 but because the subject matter
of the work calls into question the assumptions and material of
traditional forms of reading and writing. By appearing in this
294 Configurations
37. A similar determination can be found in the writings of Marshall McLuhan, who
proposed that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” (Understand-
ing Media [above, n. 30], p. 8). According to this argument, there is never an immedi-
ate encounter with the thing represented in and by a particular medium—there is only
the endless process of mediation, where one medium contains and refers to another.
38. Bolter, Writing Space (1991) (above, n. 4), p. 204.
39. Mark Amerika, Hypertextual Consciousness: A Companion Theory Guide (1997), avail-
able online at http://www.grammatron.com/htc.html (accessed December 3, 2002).
manner, Hypertextual Consciousness does what it says and says
what it does. “I link therefore I am,” states one of the initial
pages, where the word “link” is an active hypertext link to be ac-
tivated by the reader/participant (Fig. 3). “Link,” however, liter-
ally refers the reader/participant to other signs situated elsewhere
in the hypertextual system. Like the words listed in a dictionary,
the signifier “link” does not have a referent situated outside the
hypertextual document in which it appears. It is made meaning-
ful only by its interconnecting links. 40
But if Bolter is correct about this matter, then the material of
his own project becomes questionable, if not contradictory. On
the one hand, his book employs the classically determined struc-
ture of the sign, situating Writing Space as a sign of either the elec-
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 295
40. In stating this, I am not making the claim that hypertext has a more trustworthy
referential dimension than print. In fact, the seemingly endless play of signification
that is exhibited in books about technology extends to all signifiers whether they be
printed on paper or presented in digital form on the surface of a computer monitor.
The only advantage hypertext has over printed text is that hypertext is often far more
attuned to its own performative dimension; that is, it performs/enacts/embodies what
it addresses.
Figure 3. Mark Amerika’s Hypertextual Consciousness.
tronic book or the hypertextual remediation of print. In this way,
he explains and even resolves the apparent contradictions in-
volved with the paradox of a book. The various determinations
that are published in the material of the book point to and are
about something else. On the other hand, Bolter endorses the
standard critique of this structure of signification. He not only af-
firms the original absence of a “transcendental signified” and the
hypothesis that signs refer only to other signs, he also claims that
electronic hypertext illustrates and embodies this fundamental
semiotic principle. Consequently, it appears that Bolter’s book
cannot function as it has been determined. Writing Space requires
a transcendental signified in order for it to deflect the charge of
self-contradiction and to resolve the paradox of a book, but the
signified—computer-based hypertext—already demonstrates the
impossibility of there ever being such a thing.
Sign Matters
The world does not exist outside its expressions.41
“What’s the matter with books?” is that the subject matter of so
many print publications in this, the so-called late age of print, dis-
putes the material in which it necessarily appears. In book after
book we read about how the computer, the Internet, and Virtual
Reality will eventually replace the “civilization of the book” with
the wired (and now wireless) civilization of computer-mediated
communication. Ceci tuera cela. Books have dealt this with mat-
ter by mobilizing the classically determined structure of the sign.
Whether explicitly acknowledged or not, print publications have
resolved this “paradox of a book” by distinguishing between the
printed signifier and its signified. As the sign of something else to
which it refers and ultimately defers, the material of the book is
rendered immaterial and the tension between its material and
subject matter is apparently resolved. This classical semiology,
however, is not without significant complications. For at least
half a century semioticians, linguists, literary theorists, and
philosophers of language have questioned its validity and ap-
plicability. The signifier, they argue in one way or another, does
not simply refer to a “transcendental signified” but makes ref-
erence to other signifiers. Although there remains considerable
debate as to the actual consequences of this insight, what is not
296 Configurations
41. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 132.
debated is the fact that the “classically determined structure of
the sign,” although useful in certain contexts, is too simple an
explanation. This conclusion renders classical semiology ques-
tionable and, as a consequence, impedes resolution of the “para-
dox of a book,” which had relied on it. If signs refer to other
signs and the existence of a “transcendental signified” is sus-
pended or, at least, questionable, then the material of the book
can no longer be written off as virtually transparent and effec-
tively immaterial. The signifier matters, and the subject matter of
the book cannot be insulated from the effects of its own material.
This has at least three consequence that affect how we read and
understand books about technology.
First, “there is,” to deploy one of Derrida’s more controversial
statements, “nothing outside the text.”42 If there is no “transcen-
dental signified” outside the system of signs, then a book about
computer technology refers not to computer technology per se
but to other signs in the system of what could be called, for lack
of another word, “literature.” This does not mean, of course, that
there is no actual or even virtual technology: certainly the com-
puter, hypertext, interactive multimedia, and Virtual Reality sys-
tems exist. What this does mean, however, is that this tech-
nology, although extant, does not constitute a transcendental
signified that would anchor and substantiate the classically de-
termined structure of the sign that is deployed in books about
technology. This is evident in the material of books that purport
to be about the computer. Writing Space, for example, does not,
strictly speaking, refer to technological equipment: like the dic-
tionary, its signifiers signify other signifiers. Bolter explicitly
marks this in the preface to the second edition: “In revising this
book, as I have noted, I have depended on the published work of
many colleagues in literary hypertext and computer science, as
the references indicate. In addition to drawing on their printed
and electronic publications, I have also been privileged to know
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 297
42. Derrida, Of Grammatology (above, n. 14), p. 158. “There is nothing outside the text”
is one of the most misquoted, misused, and misunderstood statements written by Der-
rida. Although this problem has been addressed in several places, the most direct ex-
planation has been provided in the afterword to Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc.
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993): “‘There is nothing outside the
text.’ That does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied, or enclosed in a
book, as people have claimed, or have been naive enough to believe and to have ac-
cused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent, all reality has the structure
of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to this ‘real’ except in an interpretive
experience” (p. 148).
many, perhaps most, of the important figures in the field. I have
benefitted from attending their conference papers and from
e-mail discussions and private conversations.”43 Writing Space, as
its extensive list of references indicates, refers not to actual hard-
ware and software but to other published works, conference pa-
pers, e-mail discussions, and even private conversations. This
statement does not imply that the technology of hypertext and
the computer does not exist outside these various texts. What it
does mean, however, is that the assumed transparency of litera-
ture that is the standard operating presumption of publications
addressing technology is at least questionable, if not a fiction.
The same is true with Negroponte’s Being Digital, a book that ap-
pears to be, by all accounts, all about technology. Like Writing
Space, Being Digital does not refer to technology but to all kinds
of other signifiers and signifying events: films, conversations,
presentations, demonstrations, congressional hearings, and so
forth. A book addressing technology, therefore, is not, techni-
cally speaking, about technology, if the word “about” is under-
stood in its prepositional form as pointing to a transcendental
signified that exists beyond the system of signs. Instead, a book
about technology actually takes place in the seemingly endless
play of signifiers and can be said to be “about technology” only
if “about” is understood in its adverbial sense as “circling
around” and “indirect.”44
298 Configurations
43. Bolter, Writing Space (2001) (above, n. 1), p. xiv.
44. There are two reasons why the work of Derrida has been selected in order to artic-
ulate this necessarily self-referential character of media. First, what is at issue in this es-
say are books about new media—that is, writing about technology. For many writers of
media theory, either writing does not qualify for explicit analysis as a medium or it is
subordinated, as Derrida has demonstrated time and again, to the metaphysical privi-
lege of speech, whether that be in the form of an assumed “original” orality or the so-
called second orality supposedly instituted by electronic media. Derrida, on the con-
trary, is one of the only writers of theory who takes writing seriously; consequently, it
is his work that is most appropriate in the context of this text that addresses texts
about technology. Second, in taking writing seriously, Derrida is hypersensitive to the
self-reflective situation that necessarily structures and underlies his own work. His writ-
ing on writing is exceedingly self-reflective, allowing what is written to affect how it is
written and vice versa. What distinguishes Derrida’s writing is not the fact that it in-
cludes such self-reflection, but the fact that this self-reflection is permitted to prolifer-
ate almost without boundaries. Whereas other theorists often try to exhaust the
process of self-reflection, arguing that such “navel gazing” must end at some point in
order to get on with the matter, Derrida, following the precedent of Hegel’s speculative
philosophy (see n. 49), locates the matter in a self-reflection that is and must be inter-
minable. This kind of endless and unavoidable self-reflection is perhaps best exempli-
fied in the initial sentence of “Signature Event Context,” where the questioning of
communication turns back on itself, ceaselessly implicating the question in its ques-
Second, material matters. If there is nothing outside the text—
that is, if the existence of the “transcendental signified” is ques-
tionable, and everything is already involved in the play of signi-
fiers—then the way we address and investigate technology has to
change. The words, descriptions, and metaphors used to examine
or question a new technology can no longer be perceived as mere
transparencies for the sake of conveying information about
something else that exists outside the system of signification. It
is not the case that there either is or will be a new technology
that is then represented in the convenient and, at least for now,
accessible forms of print media. Instead, what a new technology
is and what it will become is itself a product of the print media it
is said to challenge and to be in the process of replacing. Conse-
quently, one would need to submit McLuhan’s statement con-
cerning technological change to the kind of inversion for which
he is famous: The content of a particular medium is the “new
medium” that supposedly will replace it. William Gibson’s Neu-
romancer, the book that introduced the neologism “cyberspace,”
provides the proverbial example.45 Technically speaking, cyber-
space is not a matter of technology: it is a fiction created in a
work of science fiction. Consequently, cyberspace is not the re-
sult of innovations in computer hardware and software, but is
the product of the play and circulation of signs that commences
with Gibson’s imaginative novel. This does not mean that some-
thing similar to what Gibson describes does not exist outside the
various fiction and nonfiction texts that address themselves to
the subject matter of cyberspace. It means that cyberspace—what
it is, and how we understand what it is—is not something that is
found empirically in some object existing in the world. It is
something that is continually manufactured, mediated, and sup-
ported by a complex network of signifiers that includes science
fiction novels, television programs, films, magazines, academic
studies, technical papers, conferences, trade shows, comic books,
websites, threaded discussions, blogs, and so on. This approach is
not simply antiempirical or idealistic; it is, on the contrary, hon-
est about the necessary restrictions and requirements of what
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 299
tioning. For more on the self-reflective character of Derrida’s writing, see Rodolphe
Gasché, Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Chang,
Deconstructing Communication (above, n. 14). For a consideration of the application of
Derrida’s work to new media and technology, see Gunkel, Hacking Cyberspace (above,
n. 14).
45. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984).
would be a strict and serious form of empiricism. If we are hon-
est with ourselves, we would have to admit that information
technology has never been immediately present in and of itself
such that we could justify the stance of a naive empiricism. In-
stead, what we know about information technology is always al-
ready mediated by other forms of information technology. If we
are to address information technology, we cannot ignore this
situation that constitutes the very possibility of an experience
with technology. We need to make it the foundation of our en-
deavors.
Such an approach would institute something like a “rhetoric
of technology”—a method of examination that is attentive to the
various ways technology has been situated in the material of dis-
course. This would be the case, if and only if “rhetoric” is under-
stood outside its classical opposition to philosophy—because
what is described reiterates the inaugural gesture of the first and
exemplar philosopher. “It is,” John Sallis writes, “in the Phaedo
that Socrates, recounting his own history, tells of that decisive
turn by which he was set once and for all on his way.”46 In this
crucial scene situated on the eve of his execution, Socrates de-
scribes how he began his practice by following the way of his pre-
decessors, seeking, as he characterizes it, “the kind of wisdom
that they call investigation of nature.”47 He recounts how this at-
tempt to grasp the immediate, sensible things continually led
him adrift and how, in the face of this disappointing failure, he
began anew, having recourse to these things in discourse: “So I
thought I must have recourse to λογοι.and examine in them the
truth of things.”48 Consequently, the inaugural gesture of philos-
ophy, as described by its principal practitioner, consists in a turn
away from a direct and immediate investigation of the nature of
things, toward an investigation situated in and attentive to λογοι.
A similar turn or course adjustment is necessary with regard to
the investigation of technology: like Socrates, one has recourse to
discourse and examines in it the truth of things.
Third, because of this, the examination of information or
communication technology must be a self-reflective endeavor, or
300 Configurations
46. John Sallis, Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics (Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 1986), p. 5.
47. Plato, Phaedo, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1990), 96a.
48. Ibid., 99e.
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 301
49. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im
Grundrisse (Hamburg: Meiner, 1969). For Hegel, “speculative” is not a pejorative term
meaning “groundless consideration or idle review of something that is often inconclu-
sive”; instead, he understands and utilizes “speculative” in its original and strict ety-
mological sense, which is derived from the Latin noun speculum, meaning mirror. For
Hegel, a “speculative science” is a form of self-reflective knowing—that is, it is a man-
ner of cognition that makes its own cognizing an object of its consideration.
50. Chang, Deconstructing Communication (above, n. 14), pp. ix–x.
51. Ibid., p. x.
52. Adilkno, Media Archive, trans. Laura Martz (New York: Autonomedia, 1998), p. 1.
what Hegel calls a “speculative science.”49 If what we know about
technology is always already mediated by other forms of tech-
nology, then the object of investigation is already implicated and
involved in the method of its investigation. Just as there is no
transcendental signified outside the play of signifiers, there is
also no privileged position of observation situated outside of and
insulated from the material of the investigation. This situation,
despite initial appearances, is not some kind of circular reasoning
that would either neutralize the investigation or be at odds with
what is commonly called “objective science.” “It characterizes,”
as Briankle Chang has argued, “the epistemic quandary of writers
from diverse fields in which the act of the investigation is itself
implicated in the object of inquiry.”50 The crucial task in all such
situations is not to break free of the circularity to substantiate
what Chang calls the “naive empiricist picture,”51 but to recog-
nize the necessity of the circularity and to learn to enter into and
work through it in a way that is attentive to its structure. What
matters, then, are examinations like that posed by Adilkno, the
Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge. Adilkno
begins their book Media Archive with a remarkable question that
puts everything on the line in one line: “To write about media is
to ask the question what gives writing the right to speak for other
media.”52 This book about media, therefore, begins with a ques-
tion about its own form of mediation that puts in question what
it does as it does it. Although this kind of inquiry seems hope-
lessly self-involved, it is only by addressing itself to this question
that Adilkno’s text addresses its subject matter in a way that mat-
ters and takes its own matter seriously. A similar gesture can be
found at the beginning of Derrida’s “Signature Event Context.”
Derrida begins this essay on communication by questioning the
very possibility of that in which he is engaged: “Is it certain that
to the word communication corresponds a concept that is
unique, univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable: in a
word, communicable?”53 Finally, the same can and must be said
of this entire investigation. In asking the question “what’s the
matter with books?” the material of the text is already and un-
avoidably involved in the subject matter it addresses. Conse-
quently, whatever comes to be written about the self-referential
character of the signifier must be applied to and put into practice
by the text that makes this statement. This has, in fact, been the
case insofar as the text, from the beginning, refers only to other
texts and addresses nothing other than the apparent failure of
signification, that is, the antagonism of subject matter and mate-
rial evident in these texts. In other words, what the text “says”
about the self-referential quality of text necessarily affects and
has already determined how it operates.
What is illustrated in these three cases is a kind of inter-
minable, if not confusing, self-reflection, where the subject mat-
ter addressed in the investigation is mirrored in the material of
the investigation and vice versa. But if such self-reflection is in-
terminable, then it seems that the investigations will never get
on with the matter; they will never be able to say anything about
the subject matter that matters. The real danger, however, is that
if we get on with the matter too quickly—that is, at the expense
of recognizing and dealing with the way the subject matter is al-
ready embedded and implicated in this material—we will forget
and pass over a great deal that matters. If we continue to write
and read books about technology, then the crucial questions—
the questions that matter—will not be about computer tech-
nology and the fate of print media: these inquiries, which claim
to target the actual material of hardware and software and even
address wider social and political matters, move quickly, perhaps
too quickly, into the subject matter and often ignore the material
in which they appear. Instead the critical questions, the ones that
are material for any publication about information technology,
are the ones that take these matters seriously. Such inquiries,
from the beginning, recognize that the subject matter addressed
and the material in which it is addressed are already implicated
in and necessarily involve each other. Consequently, the ques-
tion that matters is not, for example, Will the computer replace
or even destroy the book? but How and why does this question
materialize in books? What are the effects of this particular mat-
302 Configurations
53. Derrida, Margins (above, n. 20), p. 309.
ter on the subject matter that is addressed? What’s the matter
with books?
Acknowledgments
The title of this article is not my own—it is borrowed from an-
other, albeit anonymous, source. In April 1999, I was asked by a
reporter at the Washington Post to comment on the tragic events
that took place at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
The reporter was interested in one question: “Did the Internet
play any role in warping the worldviews of the teenage killers?”
In responding to this query, I noted that it could just as easily be
asked of the public library—but, no one, I noted rather cynically,
was questioning the role that books might have played. My com-
ments were eventually published in a story aptly named “As Al-
ways, the Internet Angle.” Several weeks later, someone who had
read an excerpt of my comments in a journal of library science
sent me an unsigned email, asking the questions: “What do you
have against libraries? What’s the matter with books?”
This paper was originally written for and presented to the Cen-
ter for Writing Studies at the University of Illinois in October
2002. I am grateful to Dr. Debra Hawhee and Dr. Gail Hawisher
for coordinating this event, and to the faculty, staff, and students
of the Center for their warm reception and insightful comments.
Gunkel / What’s the Matter with Books? 303
