Disciplinary measures: Münster visit, December 2012

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Yapp is a magazine created by the 2012-2013 Book and Digital Media Studies master's students at Leiden University.

The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/28849 holds the full collection of Yapp in the Leiden University Repository.

Copyright information

Image: (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) University of Maryland.

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The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Kelmscott Press, 1876.

Image: University of Maryland.

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Disciplinary measures:

Münster visit, December 2012

eric brotchie Although we students of the Leiden BDMS programme may often feel as if our tight-knit group is a small and possibly peculiar community removed from the mainstays of a standard University prospectus, it must be remembered that Book and Digital Media Studies does not exist within a vacuum. As in any discipline, cross-institutional exchange, excursions and other events are of great importance to the development of a more defined sense of academic experience.

Understanding where another group of scholars comes from, what their aims and methods are, their interests, their passions, and even their personalities forms a critical part of the backbone of the academy. Debate and dialogue within one’s own academic field may all be well and good, but if one becomes isolated in that field, and cannot establish common ground among peers far and wide, the academy can be a lonely place. It is safe to say that man cannot live among his thoughts alone, and that human experiences and the relations that govern them are at least of equal value to the academic project.

It was in this spirit that a small and curious group of students from the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, headed by Professor Gabriele Müller- Oberhäuser, visited Leiden in December 2012. Representing a different approach to the book as a historical object, the Münster group are, in fact, book scientists of the more traditional variety. Where the Book and Digital Media Studies programme focuses on an all-encompassing history of the varied platforms for the textual medium, book science is a more nuanced, highly specialized field of study that addresses the book—or Latin codex—alone as a manifestation of the zeitgeist. The interplay of ideas that resulted from the discussions with the Münster group showed to us that a common love of books, not only as technologies but also as sources of cultural capital, social cohesion and even resistance, was more than enough to bridge the gap between disciplines. We enjoyed their musings immensely.

Presenting at a seminar focusing on the value of the book as cultural capital, the Münster group thesis centred around a particular definition of cultural capital in its objectified state, lengthily described by its author, Pierre Bourdieu, as follows:

Cultural capital in its objectified state presents itself with all

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the appearances of an autonomous, coherent universe which, although the product of historical action, has its own laws, transcending individual wills, and which, as the example of language well illustrates, therefore remains irreducible to that which each agent, or even the aggregate of the agents, can appropriate (i.e., to the cultural capital embodied in each agent or even in the aggregate of the agents).

Taking Bourdieu’s Marxist conceptualization of cultural capital to mean that which represents the dominant cultural impulse in any given society, the group attempted to show that the book, historically a subjective form of cultural capital, was a victim of the industrialization of book production in nineteenth- century England. By applying the theory, the subjective wills of the agents of that society, the majority of people who lived at the time, were necessarily disregarded. This static view of the medium of the book alone highlighted many differences between the two programme’s disciplinary perspectives. Book science, it appears, may have more deference for historical materialism, or indeed other philosophical, modernist grand narratives than the collective output of Book and Digital Media Studies students.

Nevertheless, the Münster thesis was not without its merits, and was at its best when it shifted away from Bourdieu’s linear approach, focusing finally on one example of the book as a site of cultural resistance to the mass production inherent in the industrial revolution. This was the example of William Morris, a key proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement in contemporary England, and his work delicately producing handmade copies of The Canterbury Tales in cultural response to the decline of “personalized” book ownership as paperbacks took hold. This exception that proved the rule, as the thesis suggested, held great impact, showing that cultural capital as Bourdieu conceives it in its embodied state, or the state by which it is built within individuals, can often intersect with its wider objectified state. This was a particularly nice tie-off, and a somewhat welcome segue for the introduction of the Book and Digital Media Studies response, which, in focusing on the contrary disembodiment of form and content in e-book technology, leans far more towards, if any of Bourdieu’s divisions, an embodied state of cultural capital.

The Book and Digital Media Studies response, perhaps in its essence, reflected the student group’s cultural as well as academic backgrounds. More individualist in their approach, Book and Digital Media students were seemingly able to go beyond the murky historical fixity of the Book Science thesis, and allow for a greater level of subjectivity when it came to the Bourdieuian paradigm.

Effecting the somewhat deconstructionist thesis of Van der Weel that text can no longer be assumed to be “fixed”, “owned” or indeed reflective of any form of

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cultural resistance, many of the assumptions of Bourdieu were naturally hard to consolidate. Instead of focusing on “capital”, as the Marxist thesis demanded, representatives of Book and Digital Media Studies spoke more of “value”. Value in books was defined not as a cultural representation of trends in history, but in terms of production and meaning for the individual. Creativity, adaptability, superficiality, social status and usability “per-agent”, as it were, were highlighted.

As Professor Müller-Oberhäuser rightly reviewed, the response was dedicated more towards the idea of social capital or the means by which, as increasingly individual agents, modern readers are able to project elements of class or economic distinction through interaction with their technologies and their built- in networks.

And this is where the crux of the difference lay. The key and lasting distinction, borne out so strongly in the arguments of many participants in the subsequent discussion, was between the means by which text “mattered” to people in history and how it matters to people today. An evidently postmodernist edge is visible among scholars of Book and Digital Media, whereas book

scientists necessarily emphasize historiography, historical application, and largely modernist perspectives on book scholarship. A certain impasse too, was evident; the philosophical nature by which each of these perspectives had deep and complex roots could not possibly have been explained, or even vaguely acknowledged, in the tragically short space of time the visit allowed for. However, as an academic exercise, the seminar was doubtless of great worth to both parties, fundamentally progressing a collective scholarship of books that may have been hard to acquire in our various disciplines alone.

A warm thanks to those who visited from Münster, and to all who participated in the seminar and its associated activities. At the risk of repetition, such activities embody the true and honest nature of the academy as a site for the elimination of boundaries to knowledge, and the progression of scholarship otherwise prone to the annals of the ivory towers of ages past. We look forward to further discussions forthwith.

Bibliography

Bourdieu, P. “The forms of capital.” Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education.

Ed. J. Richardson. New York: Greenwood, 1986. 241-258.

Upchurch, A. “William Morris and the Case for Public Support of the Arts.” History of Political Economy 37.3 (2005): 509-534.

Weel, A. van der. Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge. Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2011.