Books for Contemporary Impatience

It was a year ago that someone lent me a copy of a pocket sized little book titled “Introducing Slavoj Zizek, A Graphic Guide” written by Christopher Kul-Want and illustrated by Piero Ferruscci (2011). It was part of a larger series of pocket sized condensations of various Philosopher’s views.

For someone of my temperament, it was a sort of idea-candy, and importantly,  I speak not of it’s content strictly, but very much it’s vehicle of delivery, particularly surrounding its pacing and parsing; it’s form.

Each paged contained a single disquieting notion in a very small paragraph or simply sentence or two, and then a variously grotesque accompanying illustration that took up most of the page.

What stuck me immediately was how unbelievably effortless and frictionless it was to read, and the particularly kind of reading it seemed command of the reader. I spent many years in my undergraduate slogging through primary texts of philosophers, theorists and historians and suppose I had come to expect a certain resistance or threshold of density, a tenor to the activity, yet this book contained none of that. No walls of text. It was almost a sort of comic, and an airy one at that. In truth, compared to my previous experiences, it did not strike me as ‘reading a book’ at all, but in practice, because of it’s slim pacing, seemed more like hitting ‘next’ on some online content churning service (like Digg, back in the day.. or more lately, meme humor sites like 9-gag)

The large instantly perceivable illustrations paired with each tasty tit-bit of thought, provided a great lightness to the pacing, and the limit of 1 concept to a page, or 2 concepts to a leaf, granted an immediate satisfaction of progress and/or consumption of the document. And yet, the book seemed barely based on causality, the pages often not so much building an argument but existing as simply a variety of instances in the constellation of thought of the given philosopher.

I am particularly intrigued by the ‘hit’ of page turning satisfaction, which sometimes seems to exist regardless or even in spite of a book’s content. This Zizek book seemed to maximize this “hit” while abandoning any claims to a coherent building and layering of a concept as might warrant one’s deserved satisfaction of progress. This kind of short-circuited consumption satisfaction, for me, typifies a particularly contemporary mode of digital information/entertainment, where there is always a ‘next’ item regressing into infinity. (e.g the Facebook news-feed)

And yet, this is a genuine ink and paper book which was exploiting, through format, so many of these arguably ‘impatient’ attributes of digital media. I am reminded of Kirschenbaum and Werner’s (2014) notion of modern books as hybrid artifacts that betray the fundamentally intertwined nature of print and the digital.

Regardless of what pure digital incarnations of this book might exist,  

I would tentatively venture to say that the physical form of this book (beyond it’s obviously digital printing etc…) could not have come into being without a consciousness informed by the impatient modalities of the internet. Or it is at least, a spin on an older more graphical and seductively less prolific reading culture that pre-dates thinking in paragraphs, and thinks more through images, maxims, aphorisms, quips, and quotes etc…

For it's lightness, I was surprised by how informed I felt afterwards, and it's content still remains vivid to me. The whole experience has forced me to seriously question the efficacy of many traditional formats of writing Ive encountered, and caused me to wonder whether the needs and expectations of information and communication have shifted dramatically, regardless of the Academy's reliance on a format of thinking and communicating that now strike me as often antique.

-Ben

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Kirschenbaum, M. & Werner, S.(2014). Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: The State of the Discipline. Book History 17(1), 406-458. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved January 22, 2016, from Project MUSE database.