outside our familiar habits of mind. It will be as difficult for us to assess this frame of reference critically as it is for us to see air or for fish to see water. Nor is it clear to what extent this “idea of the book” to which Derrida alludes is grounded in the use of actual physical books at all. Is this sense of totality, the “idea of the book” as an idea of intellectual closure, linked to the salient visual totality of neatly laid-out pages bound between two covers, the books that let us always feel with our right hand where the end is as we read them? Is the idea of the book based on the use of the codex? No immediate answer is available. Historians have identified the development of literacy, the shift from roll to codex, the development of print, and the development of mechanical print as possible sources for profound epistemological shifts, and often described these shifts in remarkably similar terms, but they have been reluctant to compare accounts.63 But even if the idea of the book did not originate with the codex, it clearly drew reinforcement from it.
For medieval Christianity, the book was the fundamental symbol of a universe that was ordered, filled with meaning, and enclosed within fixed limits. The metaphor of the book was ubiquitous, and increasingly, as the codex became the dominant form of textual preservation, the book was visualized specifically as a bound volume rather than as a roll or set of tablets.64 While the mechanical advantages of the codex (chief among them that it could use lower quality parchment and permitted easier consultation of specific passages) must have played a significant role in its increased use, it was its association with Christianity that made it respectable. As Yvonne Johannot puts it, “it is the victory of Christianity in the Empire … that will assure the definitive victory of the codex over the roll.”65 Parchment itself, in which the divine word was inscribed into flesh, became a symbol of the Incarnation. The symbolic authority of Scripture was such that it became almost synonymous with its contents. For medieval Christianity, “The text is Christ as much as it is about Christ.”66 There was a fundamental association of creation, which God speaks into existence, and the Bible, the record of God’s word and “map of divine reality.”67 One thirteenth-century commentator classified the Bible and creation as two books “in which we can read and understand and learn more about God,” suggesting how completely the book had become the model for a knowable universe.68 The book was not just a symbol of the world but a way of understanding it, a mode of thought, or what Jesse Gellerich calls a “structuring principle” in Western mentality.69
This vision of the book as a complete system of knowledge bears a close (and, so far, largely unexamined) relation to the vision of print as a complete system of knowledge. Both visions are based on the premise of the stability and universality of the text, although in the first case this text refers to the single sacred text of the Bible and in the second to the innumerable but effectively identical copies of a printed edition. Both reflect an underlying order that is equally bookish. Thus Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio medici of 1673, echoes the medieval topos of the two books of God, calling creation “that universall and publik Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all.”70 The use of this image by a seventeenth-century author might be taken as a symbolic moment of conjuncture when the order of the medieval book is subsumed into the order of print. Print reinforces the idea already well established in the Middle Ages that book knowledge is the only true knowledge, consigning alternate systems of understanding to a lower realm as “lore” or “folk wisdom” or “experience.” In doing so, it marginalizes a vast range of human activity, past and present, most obviously popular oral and electronic culture, but also song, ritual, dance, gesture, and visual design.
Ironically, then, it is the powerful legacy of the medieval book as an idea or structuring principle that has made the fluidity and acoustic and visual multiplicity of specific medieval books so difficult for us to recognize. We have read medieval texts as if they belonged to the world of print, divorcing the works from their codicological context and thus from the music and conversation that once surrounded them, from their institutional situation, and from the lives they helped shape. In this way we have transformed these works into the isolated verbal icons of late print culture. The world of print is now deeply challenged, however, and the confident assumptions with which we once approached a text, dispensing with any consideration of its material support, are now becoming untenable and thus apparent.71 Electronic texts are recapturing something of the openness that characterized medieval manuscripts. As early as 1989, Bernard Cerquiglini suggested that we might find in the multidimensional and dialogic computer screen a counterpart to the fluidity of medieval writing, and in the last few years a spate of electronic editions has begun to fulfill this prophecy.72 And even the category “writing” may be too restrictive, overdetermined by the conventions that identify knowledge with that which can be captured in alphabetic graphisms. Digitalization is now expanding the range of writings, reducing pictures, sounds, and printed words to a common mathematical denominator. Music, which was harmony but never knowledge, is now information; its substance in the new electronic order is the same as that of typography. This may invite us to reconsider the extent to which we have consigned the musical dimension of early texts to oblivion not as unknowable (although indeed it is difficult to know much) but as insignificant. And in a world of intimidating new literacies, our dependence on “liveware,” the friends who get us up and running, may help us understand the supporting role of earlier textual communities in making a book readable. This social transformation may make it both possible and useful to understand something of the textual materialities that came before us. Perhaps the end of the “Book” has made books visible.
Have we truly come to the end of the book? It has often been suggested. From the 1960s on, there have been recurring laments that book culture is giving way to electronic noise. “If we pose the question of the viability of the book,” wrote George Steiner in 1972, “it is because we find ourselves in a social, psychological, technical situation which gives this question substance.”73 Others have greeted the new tomorrow with rapture. According to Brian Boigon, “People are watching more television than reading books, yet a bunch of academics missed those important ABCs on entertainment that Ed Sullivan used to give away every Sunday night. Let’s face it, Disney and Nintendo have taken most of the attraction away from the educational system in North America.”74 Most of us hover somewhere between. Derrida’s frustratingly elusive account in the opening chapter of Grammatology captures the ambivalence of our situation. Derrida writes under the millenarian slogan “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing” and alludes to the “death of the civilization of the book”:
It is therefore as if what we called language could have been in its origin and in its end only a moment, an essential but determined mode, a phenomenon, an aspect, a species of writing. And as if it has succeeded in making us forget this, and in wilfully misleading us [à donner le change], only in the course of an adventure: as that adventure itself. All in all a short enough adventure. It merges with the history that has associated technics and logocentric metaphysics for nearly three millennia. And now it seems to be approaching what is really its own exhaustion; under the circumstances—and this is no more than one example among others—of this death of the civilization of the book, of which so much is said [dont on parle tant] and which manifests itself particularly through a convulsive proliferation of libraries.75
Perhaps we really are living on the edge of a total transformation of consciousness, a liminal situation that can only be understood partially, intermittently, and through the sallies of avant-garde philosophy. But even as Derrida evokes this millenarian transformation, the end of the book, the beginning of writing, he undercuts it, distancing himself from technological determinism, launching his paragraph from the starting point “as if” and reducing the commentary on this alleged death to predictable chatter with the dismissive occupatio, “of which so much is said.”76 So Derrida distances his metaphysical critique from historical causality and historical time—the end of the book is not the year 1967. Historians, on the other hand, have provided any number of precise moments for a decisive technological and epistemological break. The trouble is they have provided too many. Some point to the alphabet, some to the codex, some to the rise of textual communities, some to scholasticism, some to print as the key technological innovation that established book-based rationalism. Since we do not yet agree on