Abstract
In Paper Knowledge, Lisa Gitelman traces a recent history of documents from late 19th century commercial printing to the portable document format (PDF). Along the way, Gitelman not only makes a compelling case for how and why media scholars should take up the challenge of studying and historicising mundane cultural artefacts, but she also calls for a more nuanced understanding of the history of textual reproduction with implications for how we make sense of the digital present. Indeed, Gitelman discourages the use of ‘print culture’ as a broad catchall term describing the development of large-scale social and cultural logics dating back to the invention of the printing press. Zooming in on Gutenberg’s galaxy, she reveals a localised print landscape consisting of numerous genres, each with their own accompanying sets of logics and social and material practices that must be understood on their own terms and within their specific historical contexts.
It is for this reason that Gitelman chooses a single genre, the document, as her object of study. Documents, for Gitelman, are defined by what she calls their ‘know-show’ function. They are epistemic, evidential and authoritative textual objects that exist to teach or persuade and, as such, are intertwined with systems of power and control. The documents that interest Gitelman are vernacular forms that are produced and reproduced but not authored. They address no reader in particular, yet they are intimately connected to how we access and understand information. Moreover, they are constantly in motion, being reproduced, stored or discarded, passing between people and institutions. The book’s goal is to trace the cultural movements of these fleeting objects in order to understand how documents, and the techniques employed to (re)produce them, create meaning and structure knowledge at different points in time and in different social, cultural, economic and material contexts.
Paper Knowledge is as much about the possibility of media history and working through methods of doing media history as it is about that history itself. Following recent trends in media historiography, Gitelman’s account rejects straightforward narrative in favour of an episodic structure that examines four key moments in the history of documents over the past century and a half. This method is implicitly media archaeological. It takes up the call to travel unexplored paths of history and to exhibit historiographical playfulness, but it does so without sacrificing scholarly rigour. Indeed, the book’s structure serves as an intervention in how scholars think about, and write histories of, print. Although she organises her case studies chronologically, Gitelman moves quickly and freely through time, organising her detailed cases around a series of recurring themes and problematics. Questions of authorship and ownership, shifting power relations, managerial labour and the institutionalisation of knowledge and information ground each chapter and allow the book to function as a coherent whole rather than a collection of essays. Any temporal disjointedness only serves conceptual consistency.
What results is not an exhaustive history of documents, nor is it meant to be. Instead, the book’s cases work to frame the past in order to facilitate an understanding of how documents acquire meaning in the present. The book’s first chapter looks at commercial printing in the late 19th century and examines this profession and the blank books it produced – everyday documents ranging from address books and ledgers to notebooks and receipts – in the context of the emerging bureaucratic infrastructures and identities that print circulation facilitated. The second chapter elaborates on the institutionalisation and professionalisation of documents by tracing the methods and techniques developed in the 1930s to reproduce, disseminate and organise scholarly research materials. With an emphasis on reproduced typescript documents, Gitelman illustrates how the work of certain documents must be understood as internal to specific social spaces. In contrast, the third chapter explores how xerography allowed for the possibility that documents could permeate the social, institutional, legal and economic boundaries within which they existed, blurring the distinction between insider and outsider. Navigating an archive including the leaked Pentagon Papers, John Lions’ guide to the UNIX operating system, office ‘Xerox-lore’ and reproductions of copyrighted materials, Gitelman argues for both the centrality of the photocopy to 1960s and 1970s bureaucratic practices as well as its capacity to call these practices into question.
Although Gitelman gestures towards the always-lingering question of digital documents throughout the book, it is not until her fourth chapter on the history of the PDF that she broaches the issue head-on. This is with good reason. Consistent across Gitelman’s scholarship, including her previous monograph Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, is a measured approach to thinking through the relationship between past and present, old and new. Her emphasis on historical nuance tempers the duelling impulses to fetishise ‘new’ media as unique or to connect them hastily and directly to the past, yet she still suggests that the past can inform the present in complex and important ways. Gitelman’s PDF, as such, is one more articulation of the document genre, enmeshed within its own set of material, social and institutional practices. PDFs certainly exist within computational contexts and alongside and in relation to other digital formats, but they also exist as part of a longer history of bureaucracy and managerial labour and capital. As a result, Gitelman’s analysis is less concerned with the ontology of digital text and is more interested in, for instance, Adobe’s decision to separate the software used to create or modify PDFs from the software used to read them. For her, the materiality of PDFs imagines documents within a hierarchical system of labour and corporate authorship that effectively reinstated the 19th century printer’s monopoly as part of everyday business practices. While the past does not determine the future, it can reveal the stakes of the present.
In a compelling afterword, Gitelman addresses the recurring question of how her project relates to zines. In a tentative response, she suggests that amateur publishing and fandoms can and should be understood within a broader context of managerial culture and the emergence of typewriters, mimeographs, photocopiers and digital text while acknowledging the insufficiency of this context to explain the numerous historical articulations of do-it-yourself (DIY) publishing. Depriving the reader of closure, Gitelman implicitly reasserts her approach to media history as an ongoing process of asking questions and reframing contexts. As the book’s subtitle makes clear, Paper Knowledge aims only to work towards a media history of documents. Gitelman’s provocative study lays the groundwork for future research and urges scholars to think through the implications of textual reproduction and of a world that continues to be structured by documents that know and show.