HERE

A strange excerpt from a new piece in and on process:


Here, like this, now.

In that image that you once had. In that image that you once had swallowed. Somewhere the world grows. Our objects fall from our hands. We swallow things, we drop things, thus they mean. The constructed book-objects of the world are the spaces that hold it together. Books are emptiness, not form. They are channels, moving time and moving through time. Impossible places. Shabby apartments in which we blink slowly with tremendous headaches. All the lights are on. Terrible places to live, terrible places to sleep, the spaces in which we speak and write. In the dark all of these ghosts of the Book cough at once. One thousand hands with one thousand fingers. No way to stop. It is under these lights that we labor.

There are those that would preserve the book forever in the silently singing crypt of authority and stability. And there are those would establish a new authority by burning the books in the pulsing tides of digital technology. But the Book will not rest and it will not die. The Book is the object that we cherish and the metaphor that guides the construction of its technological rivals. The Book is continuously between, it draws the past up to the present and flows out into the future. It is our job to be sure that no force manages to close the Book. Now is perhaps the best time yet to be making books, to be engaged with books, because their future, and the future of the culture at large, is so uncertain. There is more at stake here then just the preservations of traditions and/or the development of new technologies. What is at stake is the flow of information, the flow of power, and the construction of new, radical languages of objects, whatever objects, that we are engaged in, from which we constitute our images of ourselves and of others.