The new JAB 15 (Journal of Artistsí Books) is the catalog of an exhibit titled; ìBook Unboundî, January 25 to March 30, 2001, Agnes Scott College. There are collaborative works by Johanna Drucker and Brad Freeman and these have an an introduction. The associated remarks are particularly useful and started me wondering how much of a platform the craft of bookbinding can be.

ìThe fundamental feature of a codex book is that it is a material support for a field of meaning î ìThe expectations for a codex are that it will be read.î ìThese temporal qualities and spacial characteristics differentiate the codex book from its unbound form î (I believe that “unbound” is used here as a reference to electronic text.)

The bookbinding platform, as contrasted with say the craft of printing or papermaking or with the trade of book publishing may seem too narrow to provide a wider access to the meaning and prospects of the codex book, but it isnít. Actually the corporality of the book is the key to its self conscious role in the storage and transmission of knowledge.

I know all this not only because I am a bookbinder but because I went to a lecture by Antonio Damasio who is our famous Professor of the neurobiology of the mind here at the University of Iowa. He is the author of The Feeling of What Happens.

Turns out that human consciousness is a by-product of our own insular corporality. The evolutionary story begins with basic bionic response to environment, followed by the emergence of emotion which prompted the emergence of feeling. Two different things, emotion and feeling: emotion is what a third party can observe while feeling is our own private negotiation of emotion.

Anyway, experiencing and dealing with emotion lead to core consciousness, a state our species shares with many others. Core consciousness leads to extended consciousness in which projections of past and future are overlaid. Using and mapping all the layers of perception, including the reflexivity that enables us to observe ourselves doing all this, is particularly human, although not necessarily exclusively human.

Other animals, especially those domesticated, may also be well along in development of extended consciousness. On the other hand, it is also possible that we are introducing this little invention, or as Demasio said, ìevolutionary accidentî into non bionic species. One of the inventions of non bionic consciousness may be the book.

Remember, from the lecture that consciousness is a weird artifact or by-product of isolation within a body, within a corporality. The traditional book does fit that precondition. It is a conceptual work conveyed by a physical object. But books are not conscious; they are something even weirder. Books are constructs of our own consciousness migrated out of our body. This explains a lot of stuff including why we use anatomic terms to describe book structure and intellectual precepts to consider content or why books aggregate so well into societies of their own that we call libraries.

That books are constructs of our own consciousness migrated out of our body is a fit for some other things. What about the seclusion of book reading? “In parallel with representing the printed words and displaying the conceptual knowledge required to understand what I wrote, your mind also displays something else, that you rather than anyone else are doing the reading and the understanding of the text.” (Feeling of What Happens, p.10) A premise of the neurological perspective on consciousness is that we own our own minds and that an audience listening to the same lecture will, nevertheless, be engendering individual owned and insular constructs of what is being conveyed.

In this context book reading contrasts with the lack of privacy sensed while reading a web page. Further the web page moves tangentially via optional links, escaping any sense of ownership of the conveyed content. The web content is not an insular consciousness migrated out of the the body. Instead it is a virulence of meanings migrated into the body.

So what new kind of consciousness reflexively maps itself in cyberspace? Can a network of computers ignite its own consciousness even though it has no body? A distributed consciousness possibly, it just couldn’t evolve our accidental, insular kind. Granting evolutionary process to any relation between human consciousness and synthetic ìconsciousnessî, we are both going our separate ways. For now and far into the future the physical book is our only companion of consciousness.

Endnote

“The experience and impact of reading itself seems so constant because it has long rested on the pursuit of long life and sound reason.” Adrian Johns

Adrian John’s in his adventurous and mighty narrative style, has investigated this theme of the book as an extension of conciousness.
But he looks at the act of reading, not the act of authorship, as the defining mechanisum. This is a wonderful essay; “The physiology of reading” in Books and the Sciences in History, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

In this study of “the power of the page” Adrian refolds historical study of science into a “history of concepts of the body and its relation to the mind and the world”. “As a result, history of science rests in the history of reading, of course, but the debt is reciprical.”

Also, follow-up with Eric Jager, “The Book of the Heart”, U of Chicago, 2000, that provides a wonderful study of the book as a mechanisum of self definition for the reader.