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On Paper
Response given at
the conference ÔOn PaperÕ, Beveridge Hall, Senate House, 30 April 2010
On a couple of
occasions lately I have had the chance to think about paper and also the end of
paper. Of course paper is a manifold thing.
I happen to have
been reading ÔIn Praise of ShadowsÕ by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, a treatise on Japanese aesthetics in the
everyday written in 1933. It is a bewailing of the end of certain practices,
flushed out by Western style – the purging of shadows by the new electric
lights, the replacement of wooden and foliage toilets by shiny porcelain, the
metal nib replacing the brush, blue ink replacing black. Paper features much.
It was lived with. In the traditional Japanese house there was a shōji (障子), a window-wall of translucent
paper over a gridded frame of wood or bamboo. It was this – so unlike
glass windows or brick walls – that produced the shadows and the soft
light of living.
Tanizaki also speaks of paper for writing and
drawing –on – as an author it is of course a concern to him. He
writes:
I
understand paper was invented by the Chinese; but Western paper is to us no more than
something to be used, while the texture of Chinese paper and Japanese paper
gives us a certain feeling of warmth,
of calm and repose. Even the same
white cloud might as well be one color for Western paper and another for our
own. Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to draw it in,
to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall. It gives off
no sharp noise when it is crumpled or folded, it is quiet and pliant to the touch as the
leaf of a tree.
Indeed Tanizaki
goes so far as to say that from the adoption of Western writing implements, ink
and paper, gathers the clamour to
replace Japanese characters with Roman letters. Were this not so:
our thought and our
literature might not be imitating the West as they are, but might have pushed
forward into new regions quite on their own. An insignificant little piece of
writing equipment, when one thinks of it, has had a vast, almost boundless,
influence on our culture.
I mention this only
because it struck me that paper is not one thing but many. And because if there
is a sense of loss or reinvention as we move into the paperless era –
which as we know has not yet proven to be such – then this text too
speaks of loss, as a certain sense of paper is replaced and along with it come
all sorts of implications. This aestheteÕs sense of the world is echoed for me
in Walter BenjaminÕs relationship to the political-aesthetic shaping of the
everyday, including in relation to paper.
I remember being struck by a
passage in a letter from January 1934 to Gretel Karplus – when Benjamin
was at his poorest, barely surviving in exile in Paris, and keeping warm by day
in the Bibliotheque nationale. He writes:
Now I have a small
and bizarre request regarding the arcades papers. Since the first setting up of
the numerous sheets on which the notes are to reside, I have always used one
and the same type of paper, namely a normal letter pad of white MK [Max Krause]
paper. Now my supplies of this are exhausted and I would very much like to
preserve the external uniformity of this bulky and thorough manuscript. Would
it be possible for you to arrange for one of those pads to be sent to me?[1]
The paper had to
remain the same. Odd in a sense – for this was a man who had got used to
working on scraps – an aesthetic of refuse. The scrap was a way of
managing and delivering information. Benjamin repeatedly treated the
composition of his work as a form of collage: he wrote out his thoughts and
also copied out the thoughts of other authors, then cut them out, stuck them on
new sheets of paper and arranged them anew. He would dash down thoughts on any
scrap he could find.
He carried
notebooks with him to record sudden flashes. All his scraps of paper, sketches
of essays jotted on the back of library book return reminders, wind roses and
co-ordinate planes that plotted ideas in relation to each other were archived.
Even the most ephemeral of texts, objects, images found a place in his archive.
The archive had its external posts. BenjaminÕs notebooks crammed with tiny
writing were deposited with friends and could be recalled by him at any time.
BenjaminÕs notebooks, unlike his other scraps, testified to a fine taste, finer
than ArtaudÕs – no school exercise book for him, but rather chamois
leather and vellum. Other people broght them for him. This was not a part of
the aesthetics of necessity. This was an archive that was organised in various
modes, including by written format (ÔprintedÕ, Ôonly in handwritingÕ,
ÔtypewrittenÕ). And Benjamin worked on a book that was never to be, a scrapped
book that remains a scrapbook – The Arcades Project, a work composed almost entirely of quotations and devised
such that the material within it remains mobile, its elements can be shifted at
will. His thoughts, the thoughts of others, thoughts on prostitutes or
bourgeois private gentlemen, advertising or fine art, all this is of equal value,
for knowledge that is organised in slips and scraps knows no hierarchy.
Hierarchies in
BenjaminÕs view also collapse in relation to mass reproduction. There is a
tension between the inviting tactility of the usually artworld, usually
semi-restricted commodity and the desire to keep it pristine, as investment
object. But, another type of book can surface – the childrenÕs book,
books that insist on play, on tugging, pulling, unfolding, teasing, gaming an
even sometimes, as in annuals, writing, drawing or colouring in. Benjamin
enjoyed and encouraged childÕs graffiti on books and cuttings out, even though
he was a collector of same.
I want to stay with
Benjamin for a few moments more. Yes, he was a fetishist of paper – and
of certain pens and inks. He wrote about handwriting on various occasions
– was a trained graphologist too. But he also yielded, without nostalgia,
to the pressures of modernity, commandeering the typewriter for his letter
writing, controversially, for it offended his friend Scholem to receive such a
missive. He had thoughts about
what the typewriter was and might become and how it might change everything,
once we had changed it. He writes about the possibility of new modes of
notating thought and suggests that the mechanical transposition of the
typewriter or other future machines will be chosen over handwriting only once
flexibility in typeface choice is available. Such flexibility is necessity
because only then can all the nuances of thought and of expression be captured.
One single standardising typeface could not provide this, he argues. Once
versatility is achieved the writer might happily compose directly on the
machine, rather than with pen in hand - this would of course
affect the resultant composition, and books would be composed according to the
capabilities of the machine, much as photographs eventually found their own
aesthetic rather than imitating paintingÕs one. Benjamin writes:
The typewriter will alienate the hand of the literary
writer from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly
entered the conception of his books. One might suspect that new systems with
more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of
the hand with the innervation of the commanding fingers.[2]
Without this
flexibility in mechanical systems of writing, what is being lost, according to
Benjamin? The pliancy of the hand in writing allows for the recording of
meaning in the form of a trace, which possesses a shape, a size, an amount of
pen pressure. The standard characters of the typewriter can barely imitate
this. Benjamin imagines and hopes for a type of mechanical reproduction that
could incorporate these other aspects, and so allow extra-layers of meaning to
be drawn from the content of words and the ways they are drawn. He imagines a
future machine, suggested by the present one, but far exceeding its capacities.
Only with this would this writing be adequate for purposes of expression. With
his fantastic machine, the energetic dance of the fingers jabbing away at a
keyboard of variable typefaces sensitive to hues, tones and shades of meaning
would type at high speed but relinquish none of the extra-linguistic meaning
intimate to handwritten characters. These extra-linguistic aspects amounted to
a type of scriptural unconscious and they were what made graphology possible.
Graphology was a technique that fascinated Benjamin and in 1930 he complained
that the academy had still not accepted this scientific method and had
appointed to date no chairs for the interpretation of handwriting.[3]
He contended that: ÔGraphology has taught us to recognize in handwriting images
that the unconscious of the writer conceals in it.Õ[4]
And this is because it takes place in a cubic space of the paper, depths
discovered in the surface. All handwriting is, for Benjamin, like the writing that takes
place on FreudÕs Ômystic writing padÕ, the childrenÕs writing tablet
that was, for Freud, an analogue of consciousness with its capacity to forget
temporarily, but always potentially recall or be assailed by any memory trace
at any moment.[5] Freud noted
how the mystic writing pad with its wax, translucent paper, celluloid and
pointed stylus allowed both erasure and retention, for words, images can be
written and then erased by an easy movement of the hand, while permanent traces
of all the etchings that have been made on it are retained beneath. For
Benjamin, the graphologist, the scratches of the surface of articulation, the
surface of writing, can likewise be probed in order to reveal a deeper
significance. Quite literally, for in 1928 Benjamin makes that claim that any
scrap of writing, any few handwritten words, might be what he calls a free
ticket to the great theatre of the world, for it is, he says, a microcosm of
the Ôentire nature and existence of mankindÕ.[6]
Interestingly, just as the ArtaudÕs notebook facsimiles have appeared, so too
have reproductions from BenjaminÕs archive in book form. We can read his
handwriting and doodles, his graphic layouts of drafts of essays and so on.
Scraps, bits and
bobs, cutting and cuttings. Here were are with a sensibility that has been
prominent on the day. I was struck in panel 3, Marking the Surface, by each
paperÕs more or less explicit dealing with chance through collage, cutting,
disjuncture. Heather spoke of the fear of arbitrary sign systems on the part of
the sighted. But they came because like the chance encounter of an umbrella and
a sewing machine on an operating table the moment was right. This hammered home
in PatriziaÕs comments on photography and its chance illuminations, its
arbitrary capturings of frozen instants – expressed by Benjamin as its
access to an Ôoptical unconsciousÕ. Henderson spoke of the chance
configurations of books curated in SinclairÕs passageway stall and the thrill
of chance findings, the great tosherÕs dream fulfilled. And it was al initiated
by LuisaÕs sense of the peculiar disjuncture on BlakeÕs collaged page in the
intermingling of proto-mass and unique papers and modes – as also in
AdamÕs commonplace book. I wondered after it all if the page seen from this
aspect of its discordant papers, surfaces, depths and volumes, scraps and
fragments, was Blake or john Gibson made again for as a contradictory
configuration, a modernist avant la letter, whose homogenization in the web
triggers Ôthat infinite that lay hidÕ. Our researches are never exhaustive. The
object that has passed through time bears traces or maybe punctures, woundings
– to bring up the paper/skin analogy – that can open and reopen and
yield new contents, new meanings on that basis of what Tony called a Ômaterial
textualityÕ that includes the physical features of the text.
Handwriting.
Typewriting. Books. Pamphlets. Ends and beginnings. Scraps. Stuff scrapped.
Books scrapped by circumstance or design. Scrapings. All of these forms needs their readers too. In One Way
Street from the 1920s., Benjamin talks of getting his hands on a long desired
book. He gives himself up to the Ôsoft drift of the textÕ, which ÔsurroundedÕ
him as secretly, densely, and unceasingly as snowÕ. To the reading child, Ôthe
heroÕs adventures can still be read in the swirling letters like figures and
messages in drifting snowflakesÕ. The reading childÕs breath is part of the air
of the events narrated. He mingles with the characters, and Ôwhen he gets up,
he is covered over and over by the snow of his readingÕ. That drifting – here a snowy
thing – came up in relation to the digital, the digital derive, adrift in
the text of the web – a mode of reading. Benjamin perhaps got to this too
– in his notion of the flurry of letters released into the cityscape.
I think of his
swirling words, flotsam of a dreamy Romanticism, as re-articulated in more
modernist guise in BenjaminÕs thoughts on literacy in the modern cityscape. As
he puts it, in One Way Street, newly
expelled from what he calls the bed-like sheets of a book, Ôa refuge in which
script could lead an autonomous existenceÕ[7],
words flicker across the night skyline, glimmering their neon messages above
shops, or they stand upright on posters, newspapers or cinema screens. He notes:
If centuries ago it
began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the
manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking itself to bed in the
printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The
newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film
and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial
perpendicular.
These vertical and
sometimes moving scripts make the fixed and regular print in the book seem
archaicly still. The urban dweller must be able to read such a cityscape - its
signs, its words, its images, a Ôblizzard of changing, colourful, conflicting
lettersÕ. Script, he notes, Ôis pitilessly dragged out into the street by
advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaosÕ. And
it resonates with developments in art, where, since MallarmŽ, the graphic
nature of script is incorporated.
MallarmŽ predicted
the future, Benjamin claims, incorporating in his 1897 poem ÔUn coup de dŽsÕ
all of Ôthe graphic tensions of the advertisementÕ. Apollinaire took this
further in his Calligrammes in the
second decade of the twentieth century with his Ôideographic logicÕ of spatial
rather than narrative disposition.[8]
And the Futurists
clambered on board too, with Marinetti insisting on typographical revolutions,
to express the disruption of syntax, metre, punctuation in pursuit of Ôlyrical
intoxicationÕ in his efforts at abrupt instantaneous telegraphic
communications. Words rise up.
I think today often
of this swirling, chaotic writing, of writing screaming from billboards, moving
vehicles, LED screens, as it has for so long – demanding and never
finding really adequate enough attention. It may be that our reading, day to
day, in the cityscape, is more like the traipse through the blizzard of words
that jostle for our attention, while we absorb them more dreamily,
inattentively. This might be the true struggle that is going on on the streets.
But they seem currently to have the upper hand. If Benjamin saw them mobilise
into uprightness, now they swarm, chasing us, catching up with us wherever we
are in those little handheld gadgets that people carry. Beeping, squawking,
demanding attention. A flurry of messages keeping us on message – on line
– on a line, hooked, lined and sunk. Our attention is commanded.
And I am captivated
by an image that I have yet to decode. Walking into the British Library or any
other library, even in cafes, all over the place, the reader-writers sit in
ranks, gazing at an upright screen, its greeny-blue illumination lighting up
their face, in the shadowy realms that the post EU light bulbs engender.
A certain return to
TanizakiÕs shadows? Or each human for his or herself a glaucous aquatic gleam. The shadows will be chased out again
soon though. Apparently this sight will no longer be with us in 5 years, as
electronic ink – if the sort in Kindle Machines – needs no
backlight and will become the preferred mode of display.
We have heard much
today about disappearances. Zara spoke of the heightened consciousness of
materiality and how the new forms reveal to us what we never knew about the old
ones as they are threatened with extinction. Known to themselves, perhaps for
the first time, they rally, excelling in what they alone can do. It reminds me
of the thought that it was only once photography had perfected verisimilitude
in the image, albeit in black and white, painting stressed impression and
colour. Medium-specificity is something that goes on reinventing itself.
We are all readers
and researchers. That is important. Our particular investments as researchers
are crucial. Other questions arise for those who are satisfied with their
e-readers. LaurelÕs talk made me ponder the etymologies of browsing and
brwosers, of searching and researching. Re-searching implies that scholar look
again and again, or find something they lost before. If we find that which was
sought before, this suggests something of that idea of reinvention: that for
us, the digital interface refinds, or looks again after print matter, the lost
thing. We come to know it anew. But what we come to know conclusively is that
it has bulk, weight, presence – enough to driver arbiters of space and
storage to distraction. Roland Barthes said of the historian Jules Michelet
that he sat in the archive and ingested history, the dust floating up into his
lungs from those old books, their leather covers, their crumbly pages, he
– as we say – devoured, seeking out the histories of France. What
is our food for thought in front of screens? MicheletÕs dust transformed for me
into Iain SinclairÕs dirt now archived inside his pamphlets at the Harry
Ransome Center in Austin, Texas. Not the dust of paper and leather but a trace
of labour. It is the dirt that tumbled from his fingers as he wrote in those
now archived notebooks in snatched moments while working as a gardener and
labourer. I wonder if the trace of
labour gets erased or obscured in the digital age. If it becomes imperceptible
because of networks and mechanisms that tend towards invisibility. The book is
an artefact. We know that system. We know the weight and value of its paper,
its print. We know its publishers. We know its bringing into being through chains
of labour. What do we know of labour on the web or with the e-reader. Text
comes to us as data, run through various display mechanisms, whose own status
as artefacts easily becomes invisible. All that labour of programmers and
server maintainers, of data inputers appears and does not appear. Property and
labour are in strange relations on the web – witness pirating, pirate
facsimiles on Aaaargh and the rest. Or labour is given freely in Web 2.0 in the
blogosphere, where data is given up endlessly without remuneration. Labour is
the same in cyberland, but different too.
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