Elizabeth Eisenstein & Conjectures on Printing

I've heard the book that this article eventually becomes cited innumerable times, and I was happy to finally read the initial investigations. The little voice in me of proper historical method was first irritated that Eisenstein lacked much empirical evidence to back up her conjectures in this particular article, but it didn't matter later as the article developed and readers like myself could see how her project is twofold: one, to bring a revisionist angle to current accepted facts regarding history of printing and books, attacking generalizations such as "the book led to standardization in language and religious thought" and "the religious standardization of printing and language led to a demystification in texts and social practice"; and two, to bring questions of printing's "effects and consequences" into other fields of research, such as technology, sociology, the political economy of media, language, and theology/religion.

As Eisenstein says, the history of printing and its ramifications is "uneven", with differences in the kinds of social, religious and political impact depending on the scope of one's research. For example, Eisenstein brings our attention to how book printing had numerous distinctions for its first consumers, who themselves varied in demographics, and in what they perhaps wanted to read, what they could read (based on limitations in literacy and in government or religious-decreed access), and their level of access to books. Some other thoughts I gathered from this article (though it sort of conjectures a little too far into the present at the very end) relate to methodology: good historical research needs to constantly question assumptions and also that the printing of books is an example of an object of study where there is a clearly meta-communicative and meta-investigative level, especially for the historian. Books are not exclusively disposable commodities- they are objects that can be constantly re-circulated, and their content is in some sense another form of sociopolitical or socioeconomic value: books can increase one's skills, change or reinforce one's opinion, and bring about non-localized or localized solidarity.

The same is true today vis-a-vis more "immaterial" non-printed forms of content and their corresponding economies of information distribution and circulation, which are products and processes clearly linked to (and also divergent from) economies of book distribution. Regarding non-printed text, I think that format does play a huge role in distribution and in acceptance of content. How differently do we treat reading ancient documents in comparison to the windows we read onscreen? How does our attention change in relationship to these reading formats? How might our attitude change when we look at books versus computer printouts or flyers we get on the street? How might certain formats work well with specific kinds of content? I recall feeling a little disdain when I first saw the Kindle. Are children reading PC tablets or text on the iPhone as their versions of "My First Book"?

Victor Hugo & Frances Yates

In The One Will Kill the Other, Hugo links the the death of the symbolic power of buildings and monuments with the invention of printing and the mass circulation of books. He organizes his argument around what he imagines edifices and monuments to represent and even embody, namely, the rise of certain theocratic civilizations and the unity of ideas and people. With the rise of printing, however, comes the twilight of architectural innovation and the proliferation of endless derivatives of earlier forms of building. Conversely, in the world of human ideas, the printing of books allows for a multiplicity of opinion: even the possibility of dissent and revolution.

I found it curiously ironic that Hugo uses a/the book as a metaphor for both architecture and printing. He calls one the "Bible of stone" and the other, the Bible of paper" (180). That analogy reminds me of former ideas of the indisputability of truth in writing, which like architecture, was considered a sacred practice (think of the Mosaic tablets and rituals of the Freemasons.) Of course I can't speak of the emergence of the printing press without speaking about current ideas of computer and information technology, desktop publishing, and the Internet representing, for some, the death of the text as a fixed, non-editable "whole." I don't agree with ideas that books are dead, necessarily, or that they existed as some pure form of knowledge- the writing, editing and publishing of books have always been a messy affair, in terms of problems of translation, access, and distribution.

Yates credits the anonymous author of the Latin text, Ad Herennium, with first describing the historical technique of memorizing sequences of images and ideas in accordance with the mental placement of these ideas on selective locations. This technique was instrumental to orators and scholars who 'mentalized' knowledge with great effort, since they did not have the ways and means of conveniently writing their ideas down and bringing them around. People practiced generating ideas, remembering their sequence, and finally delivering their speeches convincingly; in some ways, they made their minds a kind of portable locus of patterns of ideas and images that could be easily expressed in speech. Yates even mentions how the art of memory had significant ethical value, and how Thomas Aquinas attributed the virtue of prudence to artificial memory.

The chapter reminds me of how much current literature in education stresses conceptual thinking over memorization of small details (or curriculum based entirely on memorization without understanding.) Memorization of ideas and words is still desired in many areas of study, including anatomy or other biological sciences, as well as in language acquisition. Also, memorization practices and techniques are still critical today to the performing arts (theater, music and film), though the techniques for music and theatre are more related to kinaesthetic and syntheaesthetic memory- bodily repetition- than merely mental imaginings to trigger a pattern of thought.