Book Was There by Andrew Piper

Author:Andrew Piper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

[FIGURE 5.5] Aram Bartholl, Dead Drops (2010). Courtesy of the artist.

Finally, genuine sharing is about taking care of something not your own once it has been given to you. Being shared with comes with an obligation. Unlike a gift, you are more of a custodian than an owner of a shared object. In creative terms, it would be the difference between the novels of someone like the German émigré writer W. G. Sebald, who meticulously records the stories of Jewish emigrants and their memories after the war using a complicated web of indirect discourse, and the many digital forms of the “remix” or “mash-up” today. In Sebald, someone else’s story becomes interwoven into his own, but it still remains partially intact, never entirely his. Mashing, as the name viscerally tells us, lacks this sense of care or responsibility for something or someone else. It eschews commonality in the name of the commons.

I realize that criticizing remix culture and embracing DRM puts me on the wrong side of history (how old is this guy anyway?). But despite the grand claims of “everything is social” today, there is remarkably little mutuality online. On the one hand, the history of books tells us this is as it should be—having ideas in common is extremely difficult. But the history of books also gives us a glimpse into a variety of practices that can help mitigate the shearing of reading, the way it divides us as much as it brings us together. Instead of more antisocial manifestoes or more paeans to free culture, we need greater attention to the contradictions inherent in what Emerson defined as true intellectual friendship: “We will meet as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.”33

. . .

At the opening of his evocative essay on unpacking his library, Walter Benjamin suggested that one of the best ways to build a library of one’s own is through inheritance.34 I often think about this when I look at my own library. Modest as it is (I am no book collector), will my children want all of these books when I am dead? What if they don’t read German, or if they find that there are too few in French, or if they just don’t want books anymore? Will my library be referred to, as was the case in one probate inventory from the seventeenth century, as “his books and other trash”?35

Whether personal or institutional, a library is a space of sharing. Books share space with other books, accruing value through their proximity. The “stack” or “pile” is one of the most fundamental ways that books have meaning for us. But in placing books on a shelf, owners are also sharing books with others. Look, says a bookshelf, here is a collection of my ideas.

A hard drive, on the other hand, is a curious kind of library. Instead of books, it is full of files, which are not stacked, but imbedded within one another. The hard drive is more like a law office.

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