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Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes

“Listen to the dead with your eyes” [Escuchar a los muertos con los ojos].1 This line of Quevedo's comes to mind as we inaugurate a chair devoted to the roles of the written word in European cultures between the end of the Middle Ages and the present day. For the first time in the history of the Collège de France, a chair is dedicated to the study of writing practices, not in the ancient or medieval world, but in the long time span of a modern age that may be unraveling before our eyes. A course of studies of this sort would have been impossible without the works of all those who have profoundly transformed the disciplines that form the base of this new field: the history of the book, the history of texts, and the history of written culture. It is in recalling my debt to two of those scholars, no longer with us today, that I would like to begin this lesson.

There are few historians whose names are attached to the invention of a discipline. Henri-Jean Martin, who died in January 2007, is one of those few. L'Apparition du livre, the book he wrote at the urging of and with Lucien Febvre, published in 1958, is justly held to be the founding work in the history of the book, or at least a new history of the book. As Febvre wrote, Martin made texts descend “from heaven to earth” by a rigorous study of the technical and legal conditions of their publication, the combined factors of their production, and the geography of their circulation. In works that followed that book, Henri-Jean Martin never stopped enlarging the questionnaire, shifting his attention to the trades and the milieus of the book, mutations in the ways in which texts were displayed on the page, and the successive modalities of readability. I was his disciple without being his student. I would have liked to be able to tell him this evening how much I owe to him, and also what happy memories I have of our joint intellectual pursuits.

There is another absence, another voice that we need to “listen to with our eyes” – Don McKenzie's voice. He lived between two worlds, Aotearoa, his native New Zealand, where he was an untiring defender of the rights of the Maori people, and Oxford, where he held the chair in Textual Criticism. An expert practitioner of the erudite techniques of the “new bibliography,” he taught us to go beyond its limits by showing that the meaning of a text, whether it was canonical or ordinary, depends on the forms that make it available to be read, that is, the different characteristics of the materiality of the written word. For printed objects, this meant the format of the book, the layout of the page, how the text was divided up, whether or not images were included, typographic conventions, and punctuation. In founding the “sociology of texts” on the study of their material forms, Don McKenzie did not ignore the intellectual or aesthetic significations of works. Quite the contrary. And it is within the perspective that he opened up that I shall situate a course of study that hopes never to separate the historical comprehension of writings from a morphological description of the objects that bear them.

To these two bodies of works, without which this chair would never have been conceived, I must add a third: that of Armando Petrucci, who is in Pisa and unfortunately cannot be with us today. By focusing on the practices that produce or mobilize the written word and by shaking up the classic divisions – between manuscript and print, between stone and the page, between ordinary writings and literary works – his work has transformed our comprehension of written cultures that have succeeded one another over the very long time span of western history. Petrucci's works, which are devoted to the unequal mastery of writing and the multiple possibilities offered by the “graphic culture” of an age, are a magnificent illustration of the necessary link between a scrupulous erudition and the most inventive kind of social history. What I want to stress here is his basic teaching, which is always to associate in the same analysis the roles attributed to writing, the forms and supports of writing, and ways to read.

Henri-Jean Martin, Don McKenzie, and Armando Petrucci: each one of them would have been about to take or should have taken the place that I now occupy before you. Happenstance or the hazards of the intellectual life decreed otherwise. Their works, constructed in very different fields (the history of the book, material bibliography, paleography) will be present in every moment of the teaching that I shall begin today. By following in their footsteps, I will attempt to understand the place that writing has held within the production of knowledge, in the exchange of emotions and sentiments, in the relations that men and women have maintained with one another, with themselves, or with the sacred.

Present-day mutations, or, the challenges of digital textuality

That task is perhaps urgent today, at a time in which the practices of writing have been profoundly changed. Today we face simultaneous transformations in the supports for writing, the techniques for reproducing and disseminating works, and ways of reading. That simultaneity is unheard of in the history of humanity. The invention of printing did not modify the fundamental structure of the book, which was composed – both before and after Gutenberg – of quires, leaves, and pages brought together in one object. In the early centuries of the Christian era, the codex, this new form of the book, gained popularity over the roll, but it was not accompanied by a transformation of techniques for the reproduction of texts, still carried out by hand-copying. If reading went through several revolutions, which historians note and discuss, those revolutions occurred during the long-term development of the codex. Among these were the medieval conquests of silent and visual reading, the rage to read that seized the age of the Enlightenment, or, beginning in the nineteenth century, the arrival of new readers from the popular strata of society, from among women and children both in and out of school.

By breaking the earlier connection between texts and objects and between discourses and their material form, the digital revolution introduced a radical revision of the gestures and the notions that we associate with the written word. Despite the inertia of a vocabulary that attempts to tame novelty by designating to it familiar words, the fragments of texts that appear on our computer screen are not pages, but singular and ephemeral compositions. Moreover, unlike its predecessors, the roll and the codex, the electronic book no longer stands out by its evident material form from other kinds of written texts.

Discontinuity exists even within apparent continuities. Reading facing a screen is a dispersed, segmented reading, attached to the fragment more than to the totality of the work. Is this not, by that token, in a direct line of descent from the practices permitted and encouraged by the codex? The codex invited the reader to leaf through texts, either using the index provided or else reading à sauts et gambades, as Montaigne put it. The codex invites us to compare passages, as does a typological reading of the Bible, or to extract and copy citations and examples, as demanded by a humanistic compilation of commonplaces. Still, a morphological similarity should not lead us astray. The discontinuity and fragmentation of reading do not have the same meaning when they are accompanied by a perception of the textual totality contained by the written object and when the lighted screen that enables us to read fragments of writing no longer displays the limits and the coherence of the corpus from which they are extracted.

Our interrogations spring from those decisive ruptures. How can we maintain the concept of literary property, defined since the eighteenth century on the basis of an identity perpetuated in works that are recognizable whatever their form of publication, in a world in which texts are mobile, malleable, open, and in which everyone about to begin writing, as Michel Foucault would have it, can “connect, pursue the phrase, lodge himself, without causing any disturbance, in its interstices”? How are we to recognize an order of discourse, which has always been an order of books or, to put it better, an order of the written word closely associating the authority of knowledge and the form of publication, when technical possibilities permit, without controls or delays, the universal circulation of opinions and knowledge, but also of errors and falsifications? How are we to preserve the ways of reading that construct signification on the basis of the coexistence of texts in one object (a book, a journal, a newspaper), whereas the new mode of conservation and transmission of writings imposes on reading an analytical and encyclopedic logic in which every text has no other context than the one derived from its placement under a certain heading?

The dream of the universal library seems today to be closer to becoming a reality than it ever was, even in the Alexandria of the Ptolemies. Digital conversion of existing collections promises the constitution of a library without walls in which all the works ever published – all the writings that make up the patrimony of humanity – may be accessible. This is a magnificent ambition and, as Borges writes, “When it was proclaimed that the Library included all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness.” The second reaction may well be a question...