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The book, or at least the text/book considered in an academic context, is a source of intelligence, Ranciere argues, an intelligence equally accessible to the student as the teacher (‘master’), an intelligence that is not solely accessible to explicators, those with hidden, secret or ulterior knowledge.
The book, we think, stabilises knowledge. The book ‘contains’ knowledge (double sense intended), ‘encases’ knowledge or ‘binds’ knowledge. However, as Johns (1998: 5) makes clear, "... early modern printing was not joined by any obvious or necessary bond to enhanced fidelity, reliability, and truth. That bond had to be forged."
Johns continues:
"We ourselves routinely rely on stable communications in our making and maintenance of knowledge, whether of the people around us or of the world in which we live. That stability helps to underpin the confidence we feel in our impressions and beliefs." (Johns, 1998: 5)
In the 16th century, printers took to praising their craft for its powers to preserve. They contrasted their craft with that of scribal reproduction, which they characterised as intrinsically corruptive, i.e. productive of textual corruption and, thereby, corrupted readers.
It is not printing in itself that possesses preservative powers, but printing put to use in particular ways. While it is important to observe the differences between print and manuscript reproduction, it is equally important, Johns insists, to consider how the press itself and its products have been, and continue to be, employed.
The roots of textual stability are to be found in the practices of employment of printed products as much as in the press itself.
Knowledge, such as we conceive it, has come to depend on that stability. A reappraisal of print in the making can contribute to our understanding of the conditions of knowledge itself, Johns contends.
The de-stabilising of the book, as knowledge format and as knowledge technology, and the de-stabilising of ‘print culture’, then, has great consequence for knowledge as well as for its transmissibility. A major presumed base of knowledge becomes questionable.
This de-stabilising of the book, in turn, has great consequence for ‘the library’, in its role as a stabilising institution which maintains the integrity of the text/book-basis of knowledge.
Reference
Johns, A. (1998). The Nature of the book: print and knowledge in the making. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
