Over the last several years, I have encountered metaphors or lenses or whatever else we may want to call perspectives that give us new angles on established patterns. Though I can not pursue all of these experiments at once, I feel the need to mark them on this page, not in the interest of coming back to them, but simply to mark them, much like the dogears on my books in the basement
the act of dogearing performs at least as much meaning as the words the page holds.
Why bible as book? Well, in a sense, I agree with Levinas that bible is the book of books or “book par excelence.” Yet, I think book is opening to new identities, new materialities in the digital world that crack bindings but don’t undo the page. As Tim Beal suggestively ponders, “to what degree will the cultural history of the bible be bound to the evolution of the book” (Rise and Fall, kindle location 1154)? Perhaps bible is the codex of codicies and it remains to be seen how bible will be practiced otherwise than codex.
So, here is a list of questions I have encountered that might help us look more closely at the materiality and infinite or mobian cultural production of bible:
An inquiry could be made into each of the above with book in place of bible. Yet, it is this particular material expression of book, which we call bible, that fascinates me, both for the ways in which bible has made book and book has made bible. Borrowing some language from the material scripture movement, I would hold all of these questions under an umbrella of an approach we might call material bible. Material here points toward the importance of medium (McLuhan) and the value of practice (De Certeau).
I will expand on Beal’s cultural history, Vasquez’s counter-textualization and Katherine Hale’s “media specific analysis” as part of this material bible conversation.
Each of my committee members, in very different ways, have become crucial conversation partners in this area of materiality and practice. Pamela Eisenbaum and I have been working together for more than half a decade pursuing questions of how the materiality of scripture might speak to Judeo-Christian identity demarcation in antiquity. Jacob Kinnard’s inquiries into the material depictions of books in Indian Buddhist iconography as a part of the iconic books project pushed me to consider the thingness of things in more complex ways. Practicing placemaking through the materiality and motion of spaces of inquiry around Denver with Kinnard continues to challenge me to imagine bible as place, material all the way down. Sarah Pessin consistently reminds me of a difficult materiality in Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the face. With Pessin’s help, I read in Levinas that the possibility of human encounter is intimately entangled in the materiality of the vulnerability of the skin of a face. Yet, this material encounter precedes and establishes the conditions of possibility for perception itself.