Facing Books

The transition from the book to the computer as the dominant metaphor for mind

“All tools tend to be themselves powerful metaphors which affect the mind. This is as true for the clock as it is the motor or the engine; it is as true for the page covered with alphabetic signs as it is for a string of binary bits.”
- Ivan Illich, lecture given in 1987

The clock was a central metaphor for Descartes in the 17th century, who saw the workings of bodies and minds in terms of mechanism. Through Kepler and other astronomers, this was extended to the cosmos, a clockwork artefact divinely constructed and sustained. Now, the dominant metaphor is information, the figurative offspring of Alan Turing’s universal machine, devised between 1932 and 1933. Ivan Illich warned that this emerged as a singularity within the mental space of ‘modern’ science, which is to say, the sciences of mechanism. The classical sciences were the practices of those who recorded the sounds of the words describing their observations, and who faced one another through their books - and this was an entirely different way of thinking about knowledge.

There were many stages in our journey before information. The oral tradition came first, creating the opportunity for writing. The first appearances of alphabetic symbols appeared as a solid block of characters, with neither spaces nor paragraphs, such that every word must be sounded aloud: reading was an act of speaking. Around the eleventh century, this link between orality and reading was broken by the formatting of still-handwritten pages into a structure that for the first time allowed for reading to take place within the mind, with no need to speak aloud the sounds recorded on the page. Illich suggests that this change of practice precedes and outstrips the impact of the later printing press that depended upon it.

From oral traditions, to an alphabet that records the sounds of oral speech, to a page that can be silently read... this is the lineage of the book that spans millennia of human history. Against this appears suddenly a new metaphor, descending from Turing’s universal machine and Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic metaphor: the mind as information. The literary mind gives way to what Morris Berman called “the cybernetic dream”, a term Illich evokes in his address on technological literacy quoted above. There is a watershed here, a divide into two different kinds of human: the literate mind, and the cybernetic mind.

To the literary mind, a statement is an utterance - something spoken by somebody who means - and feels - what they say. As Illich puts it, for such a person “the words that make up a sentence are like the planks of a bridge to the feelings of another”. The literate mind engages with books as a kind of conversation frozen in time, allowing literate minds to face one another, even after the writer is long gone. To the cybernetic mind, conversely, “words are units of information”, strung together into messages, and thoughts are operations performed upon abstractions, programmed with data. The cybernetic mind composes texts, and the faces of those who do so are hidden. You cannot face someone who lives in such a way, you can only interface with them.

This transformation, this chasm between two different ways of understanding knowledge, has had wide-ranging and largely unnoticed effects upon human existence. In the field of scholarship alone, the last century shows a decline of academic writing as a form of discourse, replaced by a disembodied assessment of the informational content of texts. Even as late as the 1970s, the Aristotelian Society still published papers in pairs - an argument, and a response. By the end of that century, all journals had eliminated any interest in discourse. Peer review now occurs behind-the-scenes as a mere weighing of information, with scholars placing check marks within tables to indicate their calculations.

We live within our metaphors, and everything we are - whether as individuals or collectively - rests upon these artful exercises of our imagination. Humanity has been subtly deformed by the abandonment of the book, and the concommital transformation of the archive of human knowledge into a disembodied storehouse of information indexed within the internet. Whether as ‘peer review’, or as ‘fighting disinformation’, it is only within the cybernetic dream that the utter foolishness of censorship possesses an illusion of necessity. To the literate mind, this suppression of discourse means not only the substitution of dogma for scientific enquiry, but the building of a prison for our minds, within which we might never face each other again.