Before and After the Book

April 29th, 2008 Fred McVittie

There is a book on the table in front of me right now (The Craft of Thought by Mary Carruthers) and it seems to be a solid object. I know it is mostly composed of space, but that isn’t really important since it doesn’t change my experience of it. The knowledge that the book ‘contains’ is something different though.

There must have been a time when knowledge didn’t live inside books, but inside the fragile containers of human bodies. If you wanted to know something you would travel to the point in space where that human body was located and if you were lucky they would convey the knowledge that they contained to you somehow. It would be important, needless to say, to travel to that point in space during the short window of time that the person was alive, awake, conscious, and compos mentis.

Sometime after that time someone must have got the idea of recording the knowledge that they had in some way; maybe by carving it on a stone or writing in on a scroll of some sort. If you wanted access to the knowledge then you would still have to travel to the point in space where the scroll was but the window of time would be potentially larger. In some ways though, the scroll would have to be given the same special treatment as a human possessor of knowledge; it would have to be protected from harm, safeguarded against fire and the ravages of time etc. It would be a pretty special kind of object.

Maybe then someone got the idea of making copies of the scroll so that the knowledge could exist in more than one place at the same time. That would be quite a leap forward. The same knowledge would now exist in more than one point in space, and the destruction of one of these instantiations would not mean the total loss of knowledge from the world.

Print publication would extend this process even further, such that every time knowledge is put into book form it would, to all intents and purposes, become immortal. All publications (with ISBN numbers) are archived in the British Library, with the security which that implies, as well as appearing in book shops and the shelves of readers. The immortality of the knowledge is ensured partly by the treatment accorded to individual copies of the book but more significantly by its distribution. When knowledge is repeated across thousands of instantiations across the world it is extremely difficult to destroy.

It has been said (although I don’t know by whom, or whether it is true), that if you are in a city you are probably no further than eight feet away from a rat at all times. In a book culture it is likely that you are similarly no further than, say, thirty feet away from some books. Not all books obviously, but I would be surprised if there was not a bible within that kind of radius most of the time, and possibly a dictionary or other reference book of some kind. Some knowledge, even though it appears in books, seems to exist almost as a field, distributed across populated space, with the individual books that instantiate it being simply temporary devices which allow it to appear. When one book, or a thousand books, fall apart or are destroyed, the knowledge is still instantly accessible through the medium of all the other books which contain it.

Thanks to Project Gutenberg and similar endeavours it is now possible to access almost the entire history of the world’s writing through screens. Knowledge that lived in books, and across the field of books, now exists across the field of space and ubiquity is almost total. As I sit here typing I am within inches of all the knowledge that has been inscribed and digitised and can access it instantly. Truly ubiquitous, this knowledge is everywhere available. In fact, I am not even inches away from that knowledge; the wireless network that links this laptop to the access point on the wall is radiating that knowledge through space and through me as I type these words. When I summon up a page of the Gutenberg Bible, that information is in the room and is inside my body and the walls of the room and in my coffee cup and everywhere within the 20feet radius covered by my local network.

Changes in technology, social organisation, and epistemology itself mean that knowledge has changed its spots. Whereas once it was uniquely located at a particularly point in space for a very limited period of time, now it is everywhere and forever. From being identifiable as a distinct and temporal object is has transformed into a distributed and atemporal field. Nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten, nothing is burnt, silenced, made mute by dementia or death. The evolution of publication is almost complete and the pages of the book spread holographically across the space between atoms and stars. This blog is more permanent and more ubiquitous than any work of print.

This does not mean that the book itself ceases to be important as an idea; it still carries the symbolic significance it inherited from its history in the individual scroll, and ultimately the individual body of fragile human beings. This symbolic significance is evidenced by the continued popularity of book-burning; no knowledge has ever been lost by the burning of a book, but since as an action it represents the destruction of a speaking position and a human speaker, the symbolic value of the action is maintained.

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