Gitelman 2014

Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Michael de Certeau -- "scriptural economy"

"totality of writers, writings, and writing techniques that began to expand so precipitously in the nineteenth century" (x)

Paper Knowledge

"Documents are epistemic ob- jects; they are the recognizable sites and subjects of interpretation across the disciplines and beyond, evidential structures in the long human history of clues." (1)

know-show function: knowing wrapped up with showing, showing wrapped up with knowing

genre: "a mode of recognition instantiated in discourse" (2)

"Documents be- long to that ubiquitous subcategory of texts that embraces the subjects and instruments of bureaucracy or of systematic knowledge generally." (5)

similar to Latour, "inscriptions"

"Thinking about documents helps in particular to adjust the focus of media studies away from grand catchall categories like “manuscript” and “print” and toward an embarrassment of material forms that have together sup- ported such a varied and evolving scriptural economy." (6)

"Like Jonathan Sterne’s recent book on a particular format (the mP3) or Bonnie Mak’s recent book on a particular interface (the page), my focus on a particular genre works to decenter the media concept precisely in order to evolve a better, richer media studies." (6)

pushing toward digital but never fully reaching it

"A second, related argument advanced here is that the broad categories that have become proper to the history of communication and that increasingly have a bearing on popular discourse are insufficient and perhaps even hazardous to our thinking." (7)

discouraging use of term "print culture" (7)

printer used to refer to the person doing the printing; now printer is the machine that prints (8)

"print culture and the cultural meanings of printedness risk chasing each other, cart and horse, explanation and explanandum, like modernization and modernity." (9)

"Better instead to resist any but local and contrastive logics for media; better to look for meanings that arise, shift, and persist according to the uses that media—emergent, dominant, and residual—familiarly have.42 Better, indeed, to admit that no medium has a single, particular logic, while every genre does and is. The project of this book is to explore media history further, not just by juxta- posing one medium with another but also by working a selective history of one especially capacious genre—the document—across different media." (9)