October 22, 2009
The Paper Machine
From Derrida’s Paper Machine:
That the book as such has—or doesn’t have—a future, now that electronic and virtual incorporation, the screen and the keyboard, online transmission, and numerical composition seem to be dislodging or supplementing the codex (that gathering of a pile of pages bound together, the current form of what we generally call a book such that it can be opened, put on a table, or held in the hands). The codex had itself supplanted the volume, the volumen, the scroll. It had supplanted it without making it disappear, I should stress. For what we are dealing with is never replacements that put an end to what they replace but rather, if I might use this word today, restructurations in which the oldest form survives, and even survives endlessly, coexisting with the new form and even coming to terms with a new economy—which is also a calculation in terms of the market as well as in terms of storage, capital, and reserves.
Emphasis from Tim Carmody who, himself, understands the culture of reading and writing.
comments
2 Responses to “The Paper Machine”
Leave a Reply
Soooo happy that I put you in contact with this book. It’s one of the great ones of this decade in philosophy/media.
I have tons of reading ahead of me this weekend, but I am glad to be adding this on the list.