I have smart and creative friends making this project with me. My friend Benjamin Peters, a fellow doctoral student in the study of religion, texted me this photo of his marks in a print book titled The Open Work, Anna Cancogni translating Umberto Eco, p. 60. Our exchange offers a fantastic enactment of both the oscillation mentioned by Eco here (SMS exchange of ink markings on a print page) and the distention Ben points toward in his own work on literary meaning making (a proximate bible and Eco entangle in Ben’s reading of this passage).
Ben asked me if I thought this passage from The Open Work described the workings of a proximate bible. Though, as I hinted above, I think the material mediation of Ben’s question to me expresses the desires I have for a proximate bible better than any words on a page, I do see at least two ways a proximate bible performs this dialectic ordered disordering embedded within an oscillation suggested by Cancogni’s translation of Eco here.
Does oscillation connote a regular periodicity of rejection and preservation? Can oscillation capture loss or erasure or emergence in the process? Could palimpsest better signal both the entanglement of preservation and rejection and the always incomplete erasure and rewriting going on new art forms?
First, if we substitute ‘new media’ for ‘contemporary art’ in the first full sentence of this snapshot, I think we get a good sense of the palimpsestuous operations of media emergence. We could read, ‘In fact, one might say that rather than imposing a new system, [new media] constantly oscillates between the rejection of the traditional [media] system and its preservation….’ Book technology offers as an example of this entanglement of rejection and preservation. Codex book technology rejected the necessary linear access of scrolls while preserving the basic columnar structure of scrolls on its pages bound at a spine. Today’s electronic book platforms reject the fixicity of print by allowing readers to choose font size and page color. Yet, the searchability of e-book texts preserves and amplifies the non-linear access capacities introduced by the codex.
Reading in digital formats (e.g. Kindle and the internet) demonstrates the more complicated dynamics at work here than a regular oscillation. Kindle books and many other e-readers unnecessarily retain page numbers and iBooks preserve the simulation of a codex page turn. Yet, at the same time, internet reading is a return to the scroll in the way people move up and down a page and the name we use for the action. Wikipedia, an internet mediation of an encyclopedia, preserves the linear access of scrolls for vertical access to content, amplifies codex non-linear access with search functionalities, and even nods to the print codex with its use of footnotes (or would it be better to call these endnotes because they are at the end of an entry?). What are the preserving and rejecting operations at work in this digital page turning?
This palimpsestuous oscillation or entanglement of preservation and rejection in new media creates a space for ’a dialectic between form and the possibility of multiple meanings.’ Could this articulation of an open work be a performance of anarchy as we have discussed it here in a proximate bible? Does this entanglement of preservation and rejection, form and possibilities, decenter the reign of an original in the meaning making process of an open work? At the very least, the way form and meanings shape one another in this vibrating discourse signals well the importance of material media in our explorations of the plurivocality of how bible might mean today.
Second, a proximate bible also participates in the oscillation of rejection and preservation of the dissertation genre and its system of cultural capital. In order to communicate with my committee and the institutional structures that legitimate this project as a dissertation, I have to preserve some of the traditional genre systems of dissertation. I have offered a structured proposal for the project, matching (even if translating) the requirements demanded of all dissertations in our program. I am writing substantial and long form posts that engage in theoretical dialog with current and past scholarship on the topics at hand. I have even agreed to structure three linear paths through the project to guide people along more traditional chapter-like trajectories. It is my singularly authored textual units that primarily validate this project, not the constant and theoretically embedded material construction of the space.
Yet, the space of a proximate bible is fragmented and allows many ways to engage with rare prescriptive guidelines for how to trace an argument. In a way, the ‘organized disorder’ of this project performs information overload and demands the ongoing participation and interaction from my community (committee and colleagues, etc.) to make sense from the fragments. Conversation is constitutive of most dissertations, but the medium of discussion is foregrounded in the process of this project. I use media other than text where possible and I release my writing to a public audience long before the work has been vetted and polished for print. a proximate bible will never be a print product, but can it still be a dissertation? It remains to be seen what we make of the entanglement of preservation and rejection we are performing together here in this space. At its best, like the contemporary poet in The Open Work, I hope a proximate bible ‘introduces forms of organized disorder into a system to increase its capacity’ for human encounter.