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Garrett Stewart. Book, Text, Medium: Cross-Sectional Reading for a Digital Age. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY; Melbourne, AU; and New Delhi, IN: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Hardcover, 280p. $99.99 (ISBN: 9781108834599, paperback ISBN: 9781108819688, eBook ISBN: 9781108883061). Review by Katherine Prater.
Garrett Stewart asserts at the outset of Book, Text, Medium: Cross-Sectional Reading for a Digital Age that his aim is not to answer buzz-worthy questions of whether e-books are truly books, or whether one can in fact “read” an audiobook. Rather, his position is a more nuanced investigation of reading at the intersection of a book’s physical form, textual content, and linguistic medium. Stewart examines the codex format through the multiplicity of levels at which the reader is impacted by reading: materially, cognitively, and philosophically. This tripartite investigation likewise places artists, linguists, and media theorists into dialogue to answer such fundamental questions about the aesthetic and transmissive capacities of books. Navigating the theoretical foundations of the book and the author’s multi-layered writing style is rewarded with captivating case studies ranging from conceptual art, to Renaissance painting, to artificial intelligence. All these case studies interrogate and ultimately champion the role of the book and reading in the digital age.
Part I, “The Hold of the Codex,” contains two complementary chapters, “Bibliographics” and “Platformatics,” which investigate the book as object, and its capacity to participate in and challenge the plastic and conceptual arts. Stewart defines bibliographics as “the look of page-formatted script or image” and platformatics as “the reduced look of codex formats in drastically redacted sculptural form” (29, Stewart’s emphasis). Stewart’s examples likewise fall into two categories: “de-text[ing] the book,” or “de-book[ing] the text” (85).
Examples of de-texted books span centuries, including paintings that depict books in larger scenes, but whose text cannot be read. A “faux-lio” on display in a historic house (57) appears to be a book from the outside, but when opened, its filler pages reveal it to be a prop. In exhibitions, books are used as an artistic medium on which to sculpt, paint, glue, or dissolve, and machines engage haptically with physical books without an innate capacity to understand their underlying linguistic meaning. De-texting the book results in what Stewart terms “bibliobjets”, which he argues are “objectifying the form of bookhood in the gutting of its utility,” (82) and foregrounding the “objecthood” of the codex over its “bookhood.”
In contrast, de-booking the text is a more contemporary phenomenon. In one example, the creation and accessing of digital media through skeuomorphic vocabulary, or linguistic holdovers from an analog age (“flipping pages,” “bookmarking,” “indexing,” on our digital “readers,” etc.), invokes the terminology and structure of the codex when describing a new century of digital capabilities. Likewise, the text of conceptual books printed with special ink begins to fade once opened, limiting the time the books are available for access. Stewart locates the codex within an evolution of information storage and retrieval interface technologies. He considers “the book as a structural system, a dedicated apparatus for data recovery and information display,” (82), but by no means the only technological mediator for information, past, present, or future.
Part II, “The Grip of Inscription,” examines the plasticity of textual language, just as Part I weighs the plasticity of the book as object. The paired chapters, “Reading In” and “Reading Out” consider the role of text “in distinguishing merely visible image surfaces from the legible” (100) through musings about the phenomenology of text as it is both written and vocalized. Both chapters invoke cinematic and book-based references in equal measures; the former investigates the addition of meaning to language through inscriptive practices, and the latter, the addition of language to meaning through vocalization and poetics.
Stewart moves from examples of “bookworks” in Part I to “wordworks” in Part II. Drawing on “lexigraphs,” “hypotext,” (103) and other forms of asemic, unreadable writing, he separates text into the spheres of aesthetics and meaning. Font, for Stewart, is a pre-textual system of representation, moving from being understood graphically to lexically when letters are strung into words. Using a variety of examples, he likens the pre-textuality of asemic text to cinematic scenes containing background actors mouthing inaudible, and often nonsensical, words, calling them “the scenery of speech” (113). The graphic and the lexical are put into dialogue when Stewart employs an exaggerated artist-designed font in his own text in this section. Historical periods, as well, are brought together in this digital font project, as “its palimpsest of computerized lettering serves to drive it back toward an irregularity that more closely resembles handwriting” (107). Ultimately, Stewart unites the graphic and lexical components of his argument within a scene of a dystopian novel. There, the “authoritative close reading would be left to machines,” and humans would be left to read tabloids, “the opiate of the people in cheap reading” (137). Asemic text becomes meaningful, but only to machines, and legible text, readable by humans, is devoid of any true meaning.
Part III, “The Give of Medium,” engages with the work of a variety of theorists, most particularly Giorgio Agamben and Friedrich Kittler, to examine the ontology of language as a medium for communicating meaning. The dual chapters, “Phrasing the Sayable” and “Between Language and Text,” operate at the conceptual junction “between the idea and the name,” or the thoughtful and communicative engagement that produces language (151). Stewart defines language as the realized possibility for expression, “a shared potential of cerebration and evolved vocal cords, of anatomy under mental direction” (153). The “medium of language in action,” or the framing of language as a performative act, allows Stewart to explore language across the sensory strata of phonetics, graphics, haptics, and time (164, Stewart’s emphasis). By excavating the successive levels of book (Part I), text (Part II), and finally medium (Part III), Stewart brings this commitment to language back to the sculptural, conceptual bibliobjets with which he began, noting that “the obviated page serves to evince the missing vitality of wording in little and at large” (209). Whether text is read on the page or on the screen, making meaning requires the inter-relationship of all three of the constituent components of the book/text/medium triad.
Stewart’s Book, Text, Medium is written in conversation with media theorists, linguists, and philosophers, and may be received most thoroughly by audiences working within those disciplines. Librarians and book historians may wish to read it to better collaborate with those readers, and for context about current trends in media theory scholarship as they relate to topics of books, reading, and information science. The most salient strength of Stewart’s Book, Text, Medium is the inter-disciplinary connection it forges among scholarship concerning media, language, and human behavior. Were the examples that Stewart chooses treated by any one of those disciplines alone, it would be much more difficult to obtain the depth of consideration that Stewart accomplishes.
Further engagement with book historians, bibliographers, and information scientists may prove fruitful in advancing Stewart’s use of the codex as metaphor and muse in the future. Regarding book history, the archetypical “book,” for Stewart, seems to be a mass-produced book of literature. An illustrated book, such as a book of music, astronomy, dance notation, or architecture, would be “read” very differently than the text-based works referenced throughout; indeed, visual literacy pervades contemporary curricula. Books from the hand-press period, with their inherent considerations of the continual setting and re-distribution of movable type, stop-press corrections, self-publishing, etc. offer compelling parallels to the “living” documents of the digital age. As well, the format of the scroll is more analogous to the webpage than Stewart’s chosen format of the codex, and warrants additional investigation as a format for conveying information. For these reasons and others, expanding or contextualizing Stewart’s definition of a “book” would clarify and potentially enhance the study.
Like book history, descriptive bibliography is a perspective worth considering in continuing Stewart’s inquiry Many bibliographers would likely take issue with his argument that “[a] book is the support and sponsor of reading, not directly of meaning,” and that “[i]n our merely holding a book, its content is withheld” (141). Through non-textual and para-textual methods of descriptive bibliography, entire histories can be written about under-acknowledged laborers in the book trades throughout history. The structure of the binding of a hand-press book, for example, can illuminate whether illustrations were inserted or corrections were made after the primary text was printed. Visual evidence such as paper watermarks, binding style, stamps, or annotations can provide critical information about a book’s production, provenance, and usage by readers. Digital books likewise possess a wealth of informative metadata beyond the narrative text of the book – some might argue, an even more expansive “trail of breadcrumbs,” particularly about usage, than do physical books.
The expertise of information scientists working with book-based collections also contains promising possibilities for deepening Stewart’s argument. Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LODLAM) forges conceptual connections between creators, their works, and their users across both time and space. Controlled vocabularies and discipline-specific ontologies used in linked data not only hold an increasingly essential role in how books are described and made available for users, but are also ripe for linguistic analysis of their own, particularly as those authorities and protocols evolve over time in view of critical librarianship and a growing commitment to library practices rooted in social justice. Within the “spectrum of materiality” that Book, Text, Medium examines and celebrates (157), readers and creators of all perspectives should take interest in contributing to the conversation. Overall, the book is an ambitious and often insightful exploration of the variety of ways that readers might relate to their books, historically and in the future.
— Katherine Prater, Columbia University