Lupton 2018
Lupton, Christina. Reading and the Marking of Time in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.
Introduction: When Do We Read?
Our days are flooded with small texts that contract and expand to fit the minutes we choose to give them. But when do we read books, those texts whose heft seems more plaintively than ever an appeal to reading’s duration?
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I do not believe that the minutes crowded by messages, HBO series, and childcare today correspond in any direct way to time that we—posters and messengers, scavengers of the internet, wage workers and intellectuals—once spent with books.
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In focusing on book reading rather than on media consumption generally, my first gambit, then, is this: ever since people like us have had access to books, the time we’ve spent with them has been defined as fragile, hard to come by, and good to hope for.
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These arguments focus on twenty-first-century developments, but I want to wrest them back, to pull them out of shape to see what they might teach us about why reading of books in particular has been, and continues to be, a juncture where technical and human agents collaborate fiercely in creating much-desired and nonlinear experiences of time.
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They de- ploy books as the time-turners as well as the time-tellers of their modern lives.
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Yet we also know that the availability of print material increased phenomenally in this period.
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But how exactly do these two phenomena add up?
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If it is really the case that this was the age in which the private purchase, consumption, and circulation of books picked up speed exponentially as an activity, how are we to square this with the fact that the hours in which normal people were at ease were dwindling at an inverse rate?
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… most basic kind: if work time, clock time, and instrumental time use become signatures of life for common people in the eighteenth century, most of whom still work unthinkably long hours, how are we to explain the hours they sat with books in this period?
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Books pile up, get given, preserved, recycled, purchased, deferred, and absorbed at special rates because they are not punctual or as ur- gently demanding of attention as news or occasional writing. They get anxiously and sentimentally defended as old-fashioned.
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The pages of the book give materiality to the tick, tick, tick of modern life, with texts like Robinson Crusoe and Pamela indebted to this environment for their own representation of one minute following the next.
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23Even as books were taking up more space on people’s shelves as signs of leisure and learning, they were developing as technologies that allowed text to be plumbed quickly.
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I find these arguments for the book as a technology that co-operates in Thompson’s “time-work discipline” largely convincing. With this project, how- ever, my focus is on the reading of books as an activity more recalcitrant and resistant to efficiency than their indexicality and disciplinary identity suggests.
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Reading shows up as an activity that involves irregular, stolen, and anticipated moments as often as it does routine or synchronized or profitable ones.
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If print production belongs to a history of the discipline and ef- ficiency, then reading, especially of books, also belongs to a different history that has as much to do with irregularity and the dream of revolt against those regi- mens of productivity.
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Pen
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Pen
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My interest is in a literary and historical understanding of book reading as something that has been used to cut and complicate homoge- nous empty time—but also to remake temporal experience creatively in ways from which digital readers, modern workers, and those thinking today about education might still learn.
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When do we read? We read in grammatically improbable tenses not easily accommodated by descriptions of time. Whatever we read, I’ll argue in the chapters to come, we read in the interstices of time that grammar can help flag, in the future anterior, in time opened up by contingency as an aware- ness of what could have been otherwise, and in the time that has not yet come.
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back against the measurement of time in special ways, I want to stick here with the idea that reading books interferes with time in a way that is not primarily about genre.
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When the modern picaro’s story leaves no legitimate time for its own telling, the leisure required by reading is forced into view by the novel, not through representation, but as lack. In other words, even these critical ac- counts of the violence of modern life leave room for reading as the thing for which we stay up late and for texts as instruments that can be played to rhythms other than that for which they are paced, and for narratives as things that turn even relentless workers into readers to whom their books might one day, in some other tense, appeal.
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…because I want to bring literature into focus as de- scribing a particular way of holding and using books in time: as a way, for in- stance, of reading on Sunday or across a lifetime rather than as the generic prop- erty of a certain kind of novel or poem.
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They show where books happened, not where they got stuck in the process of communication.
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For good reason, histories of reading tend not to be histories of not reading—and thus to miss the very kinds of alternation and recom- bination and variations in time that I want to make visible as a property of book use in all its delights and its limits.
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Space mat- ters more than time as the field in which visualizations operate most easily, and things like the pace at which a book is read, or the intervals between its readings, are much harder to diagram. Methodologically, an unread book can often register in databases about the spread of books in the same way as a read one…
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In trying to imagine a more complete model of book use, we might learn from the field of anthropology that introducing time to the way objects are imagined in space changes fundamentally how a network is described.
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38The challenge here is to think about reading as a practice that makes the book into an object that takes, gives, and occupies time unevenly.
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As a thing read long after it was written, or saved for later, it points in the network to time as a dimension of reading that cannot be easily mapped if we think only of books as objects.
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We become literary readers, I maintain, by using books under certain temporal conditions: conditions that are sometimes partly, but rarely entirely, of our making.
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Re-appropriating through book use the hours that labor and duty take does not, I’ve come to think, depend nearly so much on the maintaining of a steadfastly bookish identity as it does on the kinds of pasting, slicing, sequestering, poaching, and suturing that reading as a discontinuous and difficult-to-realize activity allows.
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In the end, I will argue, it’s as a way of being in time rather than investing or spending time that humanities education holds out its real promise. Literature as a use of texts in time, rather than a kind of text, or a kind of reader: to the extent that this is a study of literature, this is its starting place.
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An author who imagines the existence of her text has to imagine it being read or neglected, through inter- mittent perusal or its compulsive consumption. Reading is the temporal axis along which texts project their own existence.
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To look for reading as something about which texts speak whenever they speak of time is to be drawn out of the domain of object ontology and of reading history and into that domain of theory in which post-structuralists once asked after the time of writing.
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Post-structuralism made us aware of writing as the addition of time to language, insisting upon it as a cat- egory that opens up words to an unknown future, unmooring them from their referents and from their origins in the mind of the writer.
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The days when writing occupied us in the literary academy were also the days in which many of my generation were becoming typists and processors of words on our first personal computers.
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For Kittler, the eighteenth century is the last era in which writing could reasonably be read as direct human expression.
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The books he describes reading in his youth are still there for him in old age: his reading of them can be inserted after the fact of their material existence in his world, and as props in his story. The speed at which their reading follows their publication is elastic and has no effect on their content. They can be read, as Lackington appre- ciates, after the fact. The temporal lag that comes, for Kittler, with translating things into and out of an alphabetic sign system becomes here the advantage of writing as a medium.
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…reading books remains viable and distinctive as a way of skewing and dilating time. Precisely because reading isn’t a tool for making leisure time where there is none, and because books don’t get into our brains magically (even when we work in a bookshop), they continue to require, but also to give, temporal non-equivalence as a precondition of their operation.
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…to show how book reading has helped us conjure time into being in the past—and to suggest that doing so has always been, as it must be now, a matter of political as well as personal struggle, and of creativity at the point of a text’s reception as well as its invention…