The Next Great Discontinuity: Part One
Project: The Total Library

Grapholectic Thought and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
—- published in full at 3quarksdaily.com —-

“There are things,” Christoph Martin Wieland... contended, “which by their very nature are so dependent upon human caprice that they either exist or do not exist as soon as we desire that they should or should not exist.”

...We are, at the very least, reminded that seeing is a talent that needs to be cultivated, as John Berger saliently argued in his popular Ways of Seeing (1972) “…perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.”

- John A. Mccarthy, Remapping Reality

From the Greco-Roman period onwards humans have perceived themselves at the centre of a grand circle:

• The circle is physical: a heliocentric vision of the cosmos, where the Earth travels around the sun.
• The circle is biological: an order of nature, perhaps orchestrated by a benign creator, where the animals and plants exist to satisfy the needs of mankind.
• And according to Sigmund Freud, in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, the circle is psychological: where a central engine of reason rules over the chaos of passion and emotion.

The history of science maintains that progress – should one be comfortable in using such a term – contracted these perceptual loops. Indeed it was Freud himself, (the modest pivot of his own solar-system) who suggested that through the Copernican, Darwinian and Freudian “revolutions” mankind had transcended these “three great discontinuities” of thought and, “[uttered a] call to introspection”.

If one were to speculate on the “great discontinuities” that followed, one might consider Albert Einstein’s relativistic model of space-time, or perhaps the work carried out by many “introspective” minds on quantum theory. Our position at the centre of the cosmos was offset by Copernicus; our position as a special kind of creature was demolished by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. From Freud we inherited the capacity to see beneath the freedom of the individual; from Einstein and quantum theory we learnt to mistrust the mechanistic clock of space and time. From all we learnt, as John Berger so succinctly put it, that “…perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.”

Of course my mini-history of scientific revolution should not be taken itself as a “truth”. I draw it as a parable of progress, as one silken thread leading back through time’s circular labyrinth to my very own Ariadne. What I do maintain though, is that all great moves in human thought have come at the expense of a perceptual circle. That, if science, sociology, economics - or any modern system of knowledge - is to move beyond the constraints of its circle it must first decentre the “single eye”.

Scientific rational inquiry has revelled in the overturning of these “great discontinuities”, positioning each of them as a plotted point on the graph we understand as “progress”. We maintain, without any hint of irony, that we exist at the pinnacle of this irreversible line of diachronic time, that the further up the line we climb, the closer to “truth” we ascend.

“...Reason is statistically distributed everywhere; no one can claim exclusive rights to it. [A] division... is [thus] echoed in the image, in the imaginary picture that one makes of time. Instead of condemning or excluding, one consigns a certain thing to antiquity, to archaism. One no longer says "false" but, rather, "out of date," or "obsolete." In earlier times people dreamed; now we think. Once people sang poetry; today we experiment efficiently. History is thus the projection of this very real exclusion into an imaginary, even imperialistic time. The temporal rupture is the equivalent of a dogmatic expulsion.”

- Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time

According to Michel Serres “time” is the common misconception that pollutes all our models. In the scientific tradition knowledge is located at the present: a summation of all inquiry that has lead up to this point. This notion is extraordinarily powerful in its reasoning power, bringing all previous data together in one great cataclysm of meaning. It has spawned its own species of cliché, the type where science ‘landed us on the moon’ or ‘was responsible for the extinction of smallpox’ or ‘increased the life expectancy of the third world’. These types of truths are necessary – you will not find me arguing against that – but they are also only one notion of what “truth” amounts to. And it is here perhaps where the circumference of yet another perceptual circle materialises from out of the mist.....

—- Read the rest of this article at 3quarksdaily.com —-

Mon, Mar 23, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: future, science, Consciousness, Literature, culture, myth, philosophy, reality, perception, human, anthropology, Language, theory, progress, History
Sent to project: The Total Library

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The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
Project: Polytopia

Voice: Alan Watts

Thu, Mar 12, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, universe, Philosophy, reality, perception, video, mind
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Writing (Hyper)text and Image: A Polyptychal Discursion
Project: The Total Library

The text below is an image of a Discursive (Hyper)text...

Please click it to read the full, unedited, Hyper(textual) version of this work:

Tue, Feb 24, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, technology, future, Mind, philosophy, art, perception, internet, text, writing, hypertext
Sent to project: The Total Library

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Traversing the Altermodern: Tate Britain’s 4th Triennial
Project: Polytopia

In one of the most uncanny revelations in science fiction, the protagonist of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine awakes from his anthropic slumber: the museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his future. From here the very notion of history, of memorandum, retrospection and the artefact is called into question. The Time Traveller has become lost not in space, but in time, and nothing will ever be straightforward again.

Like the Time Traveller I too am a wanderer of ancient museums in unfathomable lands. From my perspective, having just visited The Tate Britain’s 4th Triennial exhibition, history and future have coalesced, time has become space and space time in the most explosive of reversals. For I have seen the Altermodern, a series of new works by roving, mainly British, artists.

If Altermodern’s curator, Nicolas Bourriaud, is to be believed, the time for Altermodernism is not now, but everywhen. Starting from the Latin alter, for ‘other’, Bourriaud’s insistent exhibition spreads outwards, not like the spokes of a wheel or the branches of a tree, but like a spider’s web, it’s silken threads tending to overlap, to bind in globules of infinite stickiness. In the literature for the Altermodern exhibition, Bourriaud uses phrases like “the struggle for diversity”, “a positive experience of disorientation” and “trajectories [that] have become forms” to characterise a mode of ‘modern’ art wrapped in a cocoon of its own definitions. The modernist museum has long since crumbled - so Bourriaud suggests - leaving us to mistrust its linear notion of progress; to deny the inevitability of cultural (r)evolution. In its place arose postmodernism’s looped perspective of time and the artefact, where the narrative journey through the museum became like an acid-trip of self and meaning.

But postmodernism too was a dream (or maybe Bourriaud’s nightmare) destined to destroy itself. Our schizophrenic humanism has become globalised and, like the internet’s digital cobweb, grows in complexity by the nanosecond. Into his Altermodern maelstrom Bourriaud has cast a series of works orchestrated with this complex network in mind. As one ponders the Altermodern museum (The Time Traveller’s Tate Britain perhaps?), one encounters a voyage through Liquid Crystal landscapes; a fictional archaeology and the concrete head of a God; the lost desk of Francis Bacon, corrupted by digital transmission; a series of animatronic heads, depicting an artist in chorus with himself; a nuclear plume of soldered cooking pots; a gigantic accordion; an epileptic hashish bar; and a brand new global language for the Altermodern generation.

Walead Beshty’s Fedex Sculptures was a favourite exhibit of mine. Unimposing, cracked glass boxes sit on the Fedex packaging that housed them during their delivery to a Los Angeles gallery. The glass boxes became ‘sculptures’ not through the physical craft of Walead Beshty, but through the sheer, brute force of their trans-Atlantic journey. In their revealing, the damaged boxes ask us to question the notion of identity through movement. Their original mishandling by Fedex caused them to exist as artefacts, yet from now onwards they will be handled with the care given to every ‘refined’ work of art.

Aligning the walls of an adjoining gallery, and kept in the same space as Charles Avery’s God-like, concrete Aleph, is a row of textualised photogravure prints. The prints are of principal photos from history, called up by the bluff of artist Tacita Dean. Through a kind of hypertextual transfiguration Dean’s surreal and often very witty annotations incite a violent conversion via the rhetoric of cinema. Once again, time becomes space and space time as the two-dimensional celluloid moment is sent reeling in filmic antithesis.

Elsewhere in Tate Britain’s 4th Triennial, Marcus Coates develops the iconography of shamanism to its Altermodern conclusion. Wearing the carcass of a badger on his head and with a stuffed hare poking from his Adidas tracksuit, Coates attempts to appease the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indigenous animism meets modern monotheism in this short video-work by the artist.

As one wanders through Altermodern one is lead to question the specific location of certain works or exhibits. Works by artists such as Peter Coffin, Loris Gréaud, Katie Peterson, Seth Price, Lindsay Seers and Spartacus Chetwynd demonstrate signs of cause and incident that extend far beyond the gallery walls. Altermodern denies the linearity of modernism, passes through the hall of mirrors fabricated by postmodernism and emerges as a process rather than an identity; as a chain of causes, the effects of which are still playing themselves out - somewhere, somewhen - on a globalised planet. Like the future museum in The Time Machine, Nicolas Bourriaud’s Altermodern switches around the arrow of time and sticks its finger in Einstein’s cosmic eye. Like The Human Genome Project or the interwoven pages of Wikipedia, Altermoden places us outside of ‘the now’, remoulding modern culture as an explosive momentum rather than a stationary moment.

Whether one runs screaming from the monstrous figure of Altermodern or simply tweaks its nipples in defiance will largely depend on the kind of Triennial experience you desire. Don’t expect to grasp Altermodern on its first, second or even tenth viewing. Just try and remember The Time Traveller’s dilemma as you ponder and hope - beyond all hope - that your future does not become Altermodern’s past.

Altermodern runs at The Tate Britain, London until the 26th of April : www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern

— Please go to artshub.co.uk to read the article in its original location —

Thu, Feb 19, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: art, Time, perception, altermodern, review, london, postmodern, museum
Sent to project: Polytopia

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In Another city another me is writing; Another thought is unwinding
Project: The Total Library

When we think of minds we think of intentions. Intentions that lie behind acts, acts that unfold at the recourse of agents: agents with minds. In short, when we look out at the world we see objects that are acted upon and entities that do the acting. This clear cut distinction between the 'done upon' and the 'doer' appears stable, but it hides one of the mightiest constraints of our world view. A logical stand-off that threatens to undermine the logical systems upon which it is based.

In Another city all matter pulses like a living organ, where time imposes significance upon the most dilapidated dwelling or murky gutter.

Take this article, for example. It is an unwinding spring of phonic sounds, encoded into a series of arbitrary symbols, stretching from left to right within an imaginary frame projected onto the surface of your computer screen. Here lies the perfect example of an artefact with intention behind it. A series of artefacts in fact, positioned by my mind and placed within a certain context (i.e. 3QD: a fascinating and widely read blog). As a collection, as an article, its intention is easy to distinguish. I wanted to say something, so I wrote an article, which I hoped would be read by a certain audience. But what of the intention of each individual object within the whole? What was the original intention of the letter 'A' for example? Do we decide that the intention is connected to all speakers of the English language, perhaps? Or maybe all literate members of the human race? Or maybe the human race as a whole?

Another city begins at the out-stretched tip of a human finger and ends as artefacts gathered from the dust. It is a spider-web, a precious ball of dung, a bare and crimson backside glinting in the jungle sun.........

Continue reading In Another city another me is writing...

Mon, Jan 5, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: reality, science, Consciousness, Ideas, Human, mind, culture, philosophy, perception, writing, Language, Evolution, literature, knowledge, Physics
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How Technology "Reveals" the World
Project: The Total Library

“There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techné... Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techné. And the poïesis of the fine arts also was called techné.”

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (1954)

For Martin Heidegger the essence of technology is to be understood as distinct from technology itself. Etymologically the word technology stems from the Greek techné, "the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts". Techné is to be understood as craft: a “bringing-forth” / a “revealing”:

“Bringing-forth brings out of concealment into unconcealment... The Greeks have the word aletheia for revealing. The Romans translate this with veritas. We say “truth” and usually understand it as correctness of representation.”

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (1954)

This unconcealment of truth is a poïetic process, a bringing about of presence in the craft of creative engagement. This concept of the techné seems to emerge naturally when we look at art, at text, as palimpsestic. The essence of the x-ray as it peers under the surface of the painting reveals - brings-forth - a greater truth to the painting, e.g. what the painter sketched before she layered the oil upon the canvas. Our root in the present, as entities only capable of engaging with art as it appears to us now, is mediated by the essence of technology. The past becomes revitalised as a cross-section through the present.

“By going back to its own root and almost beyond it, technology is made to disclose its revealing and concealing gesture, and further yet, its deep complicity with poetic creation.”

Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Future of Theory - 2002

Any engagement with art that effectively realigns its perceived surface with its palimpsest can be understood as poïetic: as techné.

This essential mode of technology does not rest naturally with our modern view, yet in the negative of essence, one finds a boundary via which to re-define technology yet further:

“The product of technology is not a function of a mutual context of making and use. It works to make invisible the labor that produced it, to appear as its own object, and thus to be self-perpetuating. Both the electric toaster and Finnegans Wake turn their makers into absent and invisible fictions.”

Susan Stewart, On Longing (1984)

The idea of technology as labour towards product is intrinsic to our modern comprehension. But what of the technology of text? of the written or printed word? The labour which produced the technology of text is irrelevant to the essence of text itself. The essence of Finnegans Wake is in the crafting labour of readership – an active reversal of traditional perceptions. Text as techné reveals nothing less than the boundaries of consciousness, of truth, of humankind:

“For man, as Julian Huxley observes, unlike merely biological creatures, possesses an apparatus of transmission and transformation based on his power to store experience. And his power to store, as in language itself, is also a means of transformation of experience.”

Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media (1964)

Language is revealed through text as the mode of our conscious experience – a truth which furthermore transforms the very capacities of the thoughts which think it. Once text, in its essence, is transmitted and elucidated via readership there is transformation “of the process of coming-into-being of the world” :

“From a phenomenological standpoint... the world emerges with its properties alongside the emergence of the perceiver in person, against a background of involved activity. Since the person is a being-in-the-world, the coming-into-being of the person is part and parcel of the process of coming-into-being of the world.”

Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment (2000)

[ Note: This is an extract from my MA thesis, which is still in the process of being revealed. I hope you enjoyed it. ]

Fri, Jul 11, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: technology, art, Consciousness, Language, Books, culture, techne, text, writing
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The Metaphor is the Message Part II: PalimpsestsPalimpsestsPalimpsests

This slice in hyperspace follows on from these past posts:

How things 'become': The infinity of definition

The Archaeology of 'The Book'

hypertext/?="The Metaphor is the Message" (Part I)

...and is a direct response to this post by Robokku:

Temporal Hypertext

Time is important in the definition of any model, hypertextual or otherwise. At the moment I am interested in how new technologies allow us new ways to see, to realise the world around us. This constant re-definition of our realities can actually add temporality to mediums which previously had none.

Modern technology has allowed art historians to 'look' at paintings with new, multidimensional, eyes. Shine certain wavelengths of light onto a Picasso painting and it becomes possible to read marks under the surface of the paint. What's more, apply several different wavelengths of light to the same painting and multiple layers, painted by the artist at various different times, become visible.

In a sense, once an available technology has re-examined the painting its process is more obvious: the non-temporal becomes temporal. Each layer is like a snap-shot of the artist's process, their vision, even their 'mistakes'. The laser/x-ray imposes a kind of hyper[textu]ality upon the painting which previously was unavailable (but not absent - only hidden). Of course this causes the art historian to weep with joy, but it also causes an exponential explosion of interpretation from that moment onwards. Any further examination of the painting now occurs in hyper-reference. The painting can never be seen as merely 2-dimensional again.

The example I have given can be extended to countless other mediums and medias. Film has its cutting room floor / multiple editions. Ancient manuscripts have their palimpsestic layers, just as the painting does. In fact palimpsest is THE word to use here, as it applies to all medias.

Examine the outside of an old brick building and very often you will find the outline of a window that was bricked in, a foundation that no longer leads to an out-house, or a patch of brickwork that had to be fixed. Even the photograph has had its dimensionality extended. These are remnants of temporality, just like the layers under the painting: the word is a palimpsest, and I've grown used to using it often.

Now here's the bit which leads back to my original post. and acts as in answer to Robokku's questions...

How does/can this palimpsestic awareness apply to the future of information/expression? The internet contains copies of its former self, hidden not so far from view. Wikipedia has its history section and google has its cache. The Internet Way Back Machine allows ghostly simulacra of webpages to be pulled out of the deep freeze. My 1998 homepage is alive, somewhere.

But is this layering of information the same as a palimpsest? I am not sure. Binding time together with human reality are the narratives that anthropomorphises it. Follow the xray-defined marks under the painting's surface and you can actually see the former brushstrokes of the artist, layer after layer, hour after hour: time is made real in the narrative story of the artist's action.

This kind of narrative arc does not really exist in internet archives. The user is taken out of the equation and all that is left is a username editing the entry on 'Defenestration' for the 12th,17th or 26th time. A ghost of personhood can be seen, but it is far inferior to the powerful force of just one single hidden Picasso brushstroke.

How can we infuse our new metaphors with these narrative dimensions?

I linked to a Seed magazine conversation in my Archaeology of the Book piece that NEEDS to be read (or watched) again and again. Please come back after the layers have realigned themselves and add some layers of your own to this (or Robokku's) post.

Thu, Apr 24, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, art, Mind, time, hypertext, metaphor, palimpsest

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hypertext/?="The Metaphor is the Message"
Project: The Total Library, Polytopia

Readers: Do you think in hypertext?

The era of the linear tome is dead, information is a web - who'd have thought it - a net of knots in time and space, a palimpsest with infinite, self-referential layers.

I find that the model of hypertext has become the metaphor via which my thoughts, my research, finds form. I can't read one book at a time. Instead I skip between many, following an annotation in one, buying a bibiliographed reference, dipping into books by the same or similar authors in the bookstore, scribbling notes in one book about another. I make the world my internet; the library my world wide web.

Less I describe my journeys in hypertext, how about I carve them in hypertext, for you to explore?

Here's a hypertextual mind-map of some of my recent travels as reader. Click the to interact hypertextually**



I started this post because I am interested in the metaphors we use to model the world. As our understanding of the world evolves, so do our metaphors. As the metaphors shift, so our models are re-moulded in ever newer forms. The forms metaphors take say a lot about the culture they emerged from. The model, in many aspects, is not important: The metaphor is the message.

For example...

Over the millennia religions, philosophers, scientists and psychologists have cultivated countless metaphors for the soul; mind; consciousness. By looking at just a handful of the metaphors that were prevalent at different times in history, one begins to notice fascinating messages about the cultures that bore us:

If we look back over recent centuries we will see the brain described as a hydrodynamic machine, clockwork, and as a steam engine. When I was a child in the 1950's I read that the human brain was a telephone switching network. Later it became a digital computer, and then a massively parallel digital computer. A few years ago someone put up their hand after a talk I had given at the University of Utah and asked a question I had been waiting for for a couple of years: "Isn't the human brain just like the world wide web?". The brain always seems to be one of the most advanced technologies that we humans currently have. - Rodney A. Brooks

As new technologies/theories are invented, we tend to use them as metaphors to explain the world around us and within us. Consciousness isn't the only human attribute we blindly re-metaphorise.

In recent years the Gaia Hypothesis has become very successful at explaining climate change, ecology shifts or the ever-constant salinity of the oceans as the workings of Planet Earth's immune system. The model here posits Earth as an organism, inspired at a time in history when Biological, Darwinian science was reaching its peak. Newton's mechanistic universe was probably influenced by the technically cutting-edge clocks that ticked so perfectly on his office wall. Richard Dawkins' 'meme theory' of language, for instance, came from a strong understanding of genetics.

Our language itself is packed full of artefacts of metaphor. Phrases and words that have become so absolute in our understanding of the world that we forget they all came from technologies we invented. Think of the phrase "letting off some steam". Or "mapping the territory"? Or "what makes him tick? Or "photographic memory". Engines, maps, clocks and photos have become interwoven into our linguistic frameworks, used to describe anger, ideas, other people's inner-realms and inner-mindscapes.

There are countless other models that grow out of technological or ideological changes. So too do cultural movements, in turn, become inspired by the models of the world that exist at the time. So we had the Cubists working shortly after Einstein's Relativity was being devised, or Andy Warhol reacting to consumerist, mass-produced culture by creating art that was also mass-produced. At present, architects are pursuing design down an organic-pathway, originally laid out by fractal modelling, organic chemistry, and evolutionary theory. Twisting the metaphor of the organism - a concept that philosophers of Biology try to model with their own metaphors - in order to design and implement more 'natural' human environments.

And the metaphors never stop. Mind is now a quantum computer, mind is a neural network, mind is the internet, mind is a hypertext...

And so I come back to my original point, hypertext, or more specifically the application of hypertext as a metaphor for reading, thinking, researching.

Somewhere in the feedback between culture, science, technology and thought there is an idea called 'human' that persists. Trying to raise this idea to anything above a metaphor is difficult, until we come to recognise the ripples in time and space that our models of reality leave in their wake. Tracing those models back through history and off into the future we begin to draw the outline of ourselves and our limitations.

Is it possible to use and abuse a metaphor, like hypertext, to map that territory, to permanently inscribe those lines in the sand? Even as I attempt to form my ideas into words the metaphors keep coming. Can our evolving metaphors of reality, of its perception be plotted? On a map? A hypertextual mind-map? An interlinking system of symbols, signs, cultures, ideas and relationships that feed into each other, grow forward and away from each other, merge and link back to themselves with enough clicks on the metaphorical mouse-button?

What metaphors are the message? and can Space Collective, and internet entities like it, espouse new messages in their models?

UPDATE: Part Two of this piece can be found here: Palimpsests/Palimpsests/Palimpsests

** I created this mind-map with online tool mindmeister.com. It is far from a perfect, hypertextual representation of my thoughts as they relate to books. For one thing, the mind-map can only be manipulated into a tree structure, so that branches move outwards, but never come back to link with each other across branches.

Apart from this, the mind-map is merely a tool for you to explore, click on some of the links ( ) and generally interact with. Mind Meister allows for the possibility of collaborative mind-maps, could there be possibilities for Space Collective Projects etc? If you would like to expand my mind-map then let me know and I can add you in as a collaborator.

The metaphor is the message.

Fri, Apr 18, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, Mind, hypertext, metaphor
Sent to project: The Total Library, Polytopia

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History as Revolution: A Dialogue
Project: Start your own revolution

"It is in the corners of human space that the remnants of future knowledge emerge. The lost trinkets of history, left in shadows, in corners become the resounding symbols of the past for future generations. This position varies widely of course, dependant on different kinds of archaeology, but the position in space of objects determines their social and cultural value. This value, once transmogrified through time and 3dimensional space (the strata of layers) becomes of a different significance. The digging out, the re-finding of objects lets the forgotten corner becomes the prized remnant, artefact of history."

Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space

"History must be detached from the image that satisfied it for so long, and through which it found its anthropological justification: that of an age old collective consciousness that made use of material documents to refresh its memory; history is the work expended on material documentation (books, texts, accounts, registers, acts, buildings, institutions, laws, techniques, objects, customs etc.) that exists, in every time and place, in every society, either in a spontaneous or in a consciously organised form. The document is not the fortunate tool of history that is primarily and fundamentally memory; history is one way in which a society recognises and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked."

Foucault – The Archaeology of Knowledge

Thu, Apr 3, 2008  Permanent link

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The Archaeology of The Book
Project: The Total Library

Before the printed book there was the book as relic, the book as idol to knowledge. Those who could read dictated to the masses who could not. Books were material conduits to hidden, immaterial territories, placed out of reach of the proletariat – atop the holy pulpit or concealed within the labyrinthine catacombs of the private library – books were of the other, were unreachable.

For a long time the book’s inaccessibility is what granted it an authority. Instances from the stream of time were made real once admitted to the pages of the book. The performed biblical enumeration was a creative act, forging the words of the Priest into a material truth which the audience could almost reach out and touch, almost but not quite. As Susan Stewart notes:

“The book stands in tension with history, a tension reproduced in the microcosm of the book itself, where reading takes place in time across marks which have been made in space.” – On Longing, Page 22 – Duke University Press, 1993

History was true, it had form because it was manifest in the pages of the book. This belief in the formative capacity of the book created a culture of desire. It was thus inevitable that the book, once given a symbolic new life by the ink of the printing press, would find its way into the hands of the masses.

In time written language became the omnipresent signifier of freedom, of knowledge. The authority of the book was shifted to the word itself. If one could read, one had the authority only previously wielded by the few. Reading was a powerful gesture of self-realisation. The authority was now one’s own. This self resolving revolution came at a time of even greater existential resistance in the West. Martin Luther had placed the power of religion in the hands of the individual. Continental art was developing a fascination with the Earthly human not seen since the time of Aristotle. The book still had encoded within it the authority of the word, only now it was the individual who carried the means to crack that code. Access to the highest of truths was not a privilege, but a right. David Lodge:

“Phenomena such as memory, the association of ideas in the mind, the causes of emotions and the individual’s sense of self, became of central importance to the speculative thinkers and writers of narrative literature alike... The silence and privacy of the reading experience afforded by books mimicked the silent privacy of individual consciousness.” – Consciousness and the Novel, Page 40 – Penguin Books, 2003

The contents of the book became equivalent with the contents of consciousness. Words affected an inner space, twisted an internal narrative, were dictated by a clock that ticked in the mind of the reader. Books began to evolve. The novel is probably the most important of the forms which transpired. Its tendency to focus in on the mind or actions of a single individual gave readership an empathetic union with what was read. Where previously truth had been a feature of the world which stories reflected, now truth was an author’s prerogative. Stories in books were self-contained realities able to control the minds of their readers. Suddenly the authors of books were the bringers of authority, of authenticity. But not everyone agreed.

Books were now seen as having such power over the individual that they could be banned, burned en-mass, wiped from history. All the major political, psychological and intellectual upheavals of the 20th Century came with their associated book, whether actively chosen or emerging in retrospect. And with the power of retrospect many claimed that books had foretold the World Wars, the rise (and fall) of Communism, the death of history, the death of the author - even the death of the book itself. Books from the past were re-examined via new theories, new technologies of the intellect. Marxist, Freudian, Post Modern... In a world where the individual ruled, books had become the ultimate artefacts of history. A new code emerged, one which an everyday reader would not necessarily understand. A book could not merely be read anymore, it must be examined under the most explicit of conditions in order to tease apart the infinite tangles of culture that had accumulated within it. In the latter half of the 20th Century a new view began to consume the academic establishment, that truth was a misnomer.

Since that time many arguments have been fought over where true authenticity lies, and how to mediate the multiplicities that the book encompasses. In the past ten years or so it is the masses that have been given the privilege. The internet binds us together and explodes readership. For the first time in history the act of reading can be considered a truly communal experience. Web-entities such as Wikipedia and Blogger have allowed information and knowledge to authenticate itself. Cultural evolution can occur at the click of an 'edit' link, and if it doesn’t exist in the pages of Wikipedia, well, then it isn’t worth noting.

But what now of the book? That tome of knowledge, of history, of somewhat questionable self-located truths? Once again the book is emerging as an idol, only this time to itself. As mass produced information slowly moves from the printed page to the computer screen, to hand-held digital-ink devices, so the value of the printed word will transmogrify. Books will re-assume an identity that revolves around their individuality rather than ours. Artists books, self-published limited prints, historically significant palimpsests – these are the books we will come to register our faith in. Books will no longer represent a simulacrum of the idea they encompass – as in the mass-produced paperback – instead they will act as archaeological signifiers to otherwise un-locatable pasts. The internet contains buried beneath its surface a copy of its previous selves. Browsing the ‘history’ section of any Wikipedia article is like projecting your perspective back a few edits. Take time to navigate through The Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine and pristine, perfect versions of internet history will find their way into the archived menus of your internet browser. The data we perceive in books is very different. Each copy of a book is different, it has a history beyond the content it attempts to justify. My copy of Gravity’s Rainbow is a microcosm of the journeys I have taken it on/it has taken me on. Particles splashed onto it from a Croatian sea shore, specks of my sandwich from Venice airport, pencil scribbles and every single word they circle in an order I defined as I sat and took in some of the words, misread others, allowed other still to fall through the sieve of my conscious mind into the unconscious well beneath.

And books can be re-read in ways as yet inconceivable for the internet. Take The Archimedes Palimpsest for instance, a text of significance for its archaeological value as well as for the fresh insight it gives scholars into the mind and works of the ancient mathematician. Contained within its multiple, physical layers are histories that scientists have had to design new technological means to access. Shine a laser onto the calcified pages and beneath each a multi-verse of forms emerge, each layer needing to be decoded separately, each signifier spanning off into infinite possible meanings beyond. Books are crucial to our understanding of our place in time and space, because they are fundamentally composed of time and space. They carry with them the history of thought, of physical presence and of psychological evolution that created them, moved them forward and now sends them explosively back into their own pasts. To understand ourselves we need to understand our pasts, to understand our pasts we need to examine the artefacts we carry with us, which carry us forwards:

“Michael Shanks: A lot of people think that archaeology—archaeologists—discover the past. And that's only a tiny bit true. I think it's more accurate to say that they work on what remains. That may sometimes involve, absolutely, coming across stuff from the past—maybe a trilobite fossil, or a piece of Roman pottery... but the key thing about archaeology is that it works on what's left. And that makes of all of us, really, a kind of archaeologist. We're all archaeologists now, working on what's left of the past.

... as we explore this stuff, we figure out how to bring it forward, first into the present, through our interpretation of it...

Lynn Hershmann Leeson: Exactly. Revitalize the past, inserting it into the present, which gives direction to its future.

Michael Shanks: Yeah. Displacement is another key feature of this archaeological sensibility. What happens when old stuff—remains—are shirted into new associations...

And, actually, this is what archaeological science has always offered—accounts of everyday life with which we can all identify and yet find uncanny. It may simply be a thumbprint upon an ancient pot that connects an inconsequential past moment with the present; it may be the evidence of the lives of those who built a place like Stonehenge. It is the archaeological focus on the everyday that many people find fascinating.

Lynn Hershmann Leeson: Because these are the relics of ourselves.”

– Archaeologist Michael Shanks in discussion with artist Lynn Hershman Leeson : Extract taken from Seed Magazine, October 2007

Mon, Mar 17, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: Philosophy, technology, Books, perception, Consciousness, History, Language, Human, culture, archaeology, emergence
Sent to project: The Total Library

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