Indexical Affordances (Technologies of Writing Redux)

We took a look at some passages in Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyages to the Moon and the Sun today in the Technologies of Writing seminar. I was particularly struck by this one (as translated by Richard Aldington):

At the opening of the box I found something in metal almost similar to our clocks, filled with an infinite number of little springs and imperceptible machines. It is a book indeed, but a miraculous book without pages or letters; in fine, it is a book to learn from which eyes are useless, only ears are needed. When someone wishes to read he winds up the machine with a large number of all sorts of keys; then he turns the pointer toward the chatper he wishes to hear, and immediately, as if from a man’s mouth or a musical instument, this machine gives out all the distinct and different sounds which serve as the epxression of speech between the noble Moon-dwellers.

When I had reflected on this miraculous invention in book-making I was no longer surprised that the young men of that country possessed more knowledge at sixteen or eighteen than grey-beards in our World. Since they know how to read as soon as they speak, they are never without reading. Indoors, out of doors, in town, travelling, on foot, on horseback, they can have in their pocket or hanging from their saddle-bows as many as thirty of these books, and they have only to wind up a spring to hear a chapter, or several chapters if they are in the mood to hear a whole book. In this way you have continually about you all great men, living or dead, and you hear them viva voce.

Obviously there’s much one can say about the way this anticipates the gramophone, or even books on tape and iPods. The business about juveniles having more information at their disposal than the elders of previous generations sounds especially contemporary. But what really interests me here is that the exercise of re-imagining the book yields up an almost phenomenological definition of what a book is. Note that de Bergerac explicitly jettisons both pages and letters. Clearly you can have a book without them. What is essential, in fact what seems treated with inordinate specificity, is that a book is divisible into chapters. The essence of the book emerges, therefore, as indexical space: “he turns the pointer towards the chapter he wishes to hear.”

Indexical space has been a constant theme this semester, from the way one interacts with a codex with their hands (unlike a scroll which uses the hands to hold it open, a book is free standing and the reader can use their hands for navigation—holding open several pages at once—or else—crucially—the hand can be used for writing). With books also come bookmarks, artificial technologies for multiplying the fingers and the hands, as visualized in this painting by Arcimboldo.

This is the digital book in the most literal sense. More recently, we’ve read about manicules, the representations of the readers’ pointing hand ubiquitous in early modern books (manicules were both drawn and printed—Bill Sherman has been doing fascinating work on these symbols of late, and the observant reader will note that you see them everywhere).

De Bergerac’s book machine is thus very much in keeping with what I’ve learned these last few months about books, bookspace, bodies, and readers. Some similar ideas emerge in a book called The Myth of the Paperless Office (MIT, 2004). The key concept is that of affordances, the authors’ term for the raw, literal, material specificity of particular media—the fact that paper is pliable, for example, or that it is porous and has two sides. (PBS pointed this out in the seminar today: in an era when paper was an expensive and precious commodity—for a while you couldn’t be buried in 17th century England in linens because the rag was wanted for paper making—there are a striking number of documents that survive that are printed only on one side. Why? Because they were disseminated by posting, that is by being affixed to a vertical surface in a public space—an affordance specific to paper.) Compare how coarse the digital screen is in the same dissemination plane in the same kinds of public spaces:

But screens have their affordances too . . .

The question here is not what you see but how you see.