This post was the hypothesis and scope section of my initial dissertation proposal in the Spring of 2015.
Chagall, Moses receiving tablets, 1966
Some cultural categories consistently go unquestioned, particularly by those whose livelihoods are deeply invested in the significance and maintenance of such a category. In the Fall of 2013, I participated in a lively exchange in our annual departmental colloquium for faculty and students in the biblical interpretation concentration of our joint doctoral program in religious studies at the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology. We were discussing the well worn idea in religious studies that the category of religion is a construct of scholars and has no clear or consistent cultural referent. Most in the room didn’t skip a beat when it was suggested that with religion, “there’s no there there,” (a common quip by my friend and teacher, Jacob Kinnard). Yet, when I wondered with the group, “What if there’s no there there with bible either,” people couldn’t get behind this cultural construction all the way down.
We can hold a bible, there’s something we can touch and point at that we call bible or at least that many call bible. There are whole industries built around producing this thing we call bible. It’s a book with pages and covers and texts that speak of something. Of course there’s a there there. We begin articles and dissertations defending our definition and category of religion, yet, hardly anyone takes even the space of a footnote to reflect on this cultural juggernaut we call bible. The materiality of bibles, the texts within, and the ways in which scholars and religious practitioners alike have devoted their lives to these codex leaves somehow give the illusion that when it comes to bible, there is most definitely a there there. Why?
As with religion (and any other cultural category), bible is nothing short of practiced or performed and the technologies that mediate bible in a given time and place indelibly reflect and shape this performance. This project, which I have called a proximate bible, hopes to participate in and continue these conversations about how media shape the way we encounter books and how reading shapes the way we imagine the world.
In the twilight of the codex as a dominant cultural form, what will bible become? Better yet, how will bible be practiced? What markings will remain of the codex in the palimpsestuous mobile and digital cultural translations of bible occurring today and into tomorrow?
To explore these and related questions, a proximate bible will explore three modes of anarchic meaning making (simulacrum, thirdspace and face-to-face) as they intersect three experiments in material bible:
- scroll to codex to kindle: translating the book How do material book technologies relate to constructions of scripture and religious identity in antiquity and today? Looking at media evolution as a kind of ongoing intersemiotic translation, I will focus on the advent and expansion of non-linear access as bible has moved from scroll to codex to kindle. As with all translations, each transformation involves gain and loss, similarity and difference, revealing and concealing. As book undergoes a media translation on the scale of the printing press, the material practices that constitute the cultural phenomenon of bible will undoubtedly change as will the identities of those who call themselves people of the book.
- (re)placing the veil: thirding the letter/spirit dichotomy What can we learn about the spatiality of reading from a close look at the role of the veil in the apostle Paul’s use of Sinai revelation tradition in 2 Corinthians 3? We move from the simulacral tablets and veiled face of Moses in Exodus 34 to the stark binaries and illuminated spiritual reading of Moses in 2 Corinthians 3. In a textual analysis of the materiality of reading and revelation, the veil enacts a Soja-like thirdspace, a place where historicality, sociality and spatiality entangle to make bible.
- facing the deep: bible as anarchic practice What would a mobile app look like and what technologies would it use to provide a space to practice the anarchy of bible? Reading al-paneh tehom in Genesis 1.2 alongside Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the face, I will design a mobile bible app that will perform the anarchy and materiality of proximity explored throughout a proximate bible. Using technologies such as Natural Language Processing, Optical Character Recognition, and Object Oriented Databases to augment mobile collaborative curation tools, we will see the words of bible become a sur-face that enables contact with and participation in the infinite and uncontainable tradition that continues to construct the cultural phenomenon of bible. As an initial case study for this application, I will focus on the veil tradition explored in (re)placing the veil.