Many vague things that I’ve thought about proclamations of the death of the book were put into words by Duguid in this article. As I understand his
project, Duguid wants to debunk the myths surrounding “the death of the book”
by both historicizing them and viewing them from a materialist
perspective. In support of this project,
he makes use of Walter Benjamin’s concept of accumulative history (the “Angel
of History” who moves backwards into the future, facing its trail of rubbish)
and Raymond Williams’ emphasis on how the material world and the social world
interact with each other (the “social-material complex”).
In particular, Duguid debunks the myths of “supersession”—the
idea that the new replaces the old—and “liberation”—the idea that what is new
gives us less restricted access than what is old. Duguid points out that supersession often
acts as a marketing ploy, but I think that liberation does as well. This makes sense to me because every time
someone announces the death of some outdated technology (and the subsequent
rise of a new one), I always think it sounds like an infomercial. Yes,
folks, the new Food Processor X will replace all of your old cooking devices
because it gives you more of what you really want, and faster, and frees you
from all those old, slow, difficult methods. But people didn’t start throwing out their stoves
and conventional ovens when microwaves appeared. At least not in most contexts.
Besides commodity capitalism, another source of this
unwarranted optimism about new technology which Duguid traces is postmodernism
itself: the way it cuts off the past and offers a “seamless” narrative of
history except for the seam “which often falls just behind the claimant” (71). But as he argues, this method of history
leads to making discoveries about the present that are only radical if you don’t
know the past. “A skepticism we have
been led to believe characteristic of the postmodern reader was, it seems,
evident even at the start of the enlightenment project” (70).
This criticism seems apt, but I also wonder if there are
other driving factors behind the-death-of-the-old-and-the-birth-of-the-new that
Duguid doesn’t consider. Are there other
myths besides supersession and liberation?
I also notice that Duguid’s critique seems to vacillate between moments
that are in favor of historical metanarratives and moments that are not.
Duguid also emphasizes the fact that books are not simply
containers but also producers of information.
He conceptualizes contemporary proclamations of book-death as
misunderstandings of what books promise as a technology and have come to mean
over time socially. In the fifth section
of his article “Future Concerns,” he discusses what effects the changes in
technology (demassification and dematerialization) are having on social
organization—a trend toward individuation and separation.
Then, he makes a move that I understand in theory, but not
in what he actually writes. He traces a
“predecessor” to hypertext to show that it’s not as new and radical as people
think. His predecessor is the
bookkeeping practices of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century merchants, which
give rise (he claims—via Habermas) to newspapers and journals (emphasis his) that attempted to collect the kinds of
information that merchants were interested in and make it available in a
“disinterested” way to the public (a “disinterested” way that would earn
money). Duguid emphasizes the difference
between the interested and private bookkeeping accounts and the disinterested
and public newspapers. For him, the
bookkeeper’s products were more like hypertext because they were personalized
and private collections of information.
In other words, he reads hypertext as a reversion away from a world
which benefits from the existence of the public sphere.
On my part, I was confused in this section by how Duguid
made his steps from one thought to the next.
I’m pretty sure his point was that the content and social effects of
account registers and hypertext information are similar, but he’s pulled them
out of time in a way that allows him to read hypertext as a reversion and not
as a potential further rotation of a cycle that will come back around to
something like the public sphere (which he seems to favor anyway). This is a spot where his critique is both
against and in favor of historical narratives of technology. Also, why aren’t newspapers a kind of
hypertext? They have those links where
the front page articles get cut off. And
hypertexts can be made public via the internet.
Or maybe I have that wrong—perhaps the internet is a kind of hyperlinked
public sphere. Don’t ask me to sort that
one out.
But in general, I was also occasionally confused by the way that
Duguid doesn’t articulate what he means by “book.” He talks about newspapers, journals,
registers, novels, and hypertext, but what does he think people mean when they
say “book”? Are they thinking about
novels? (Because he makes interesting
use of Hugo throughout the text.) I
think that an answer to this question is probably present in his text, but the
fact that he doesn’t foreground it adds to the confusion surrounding what it
means to say that the book is
dying. The material form and the textual
content of the book—though certainly interdependent—appear to default more to
the material.
