Andrew Piper: The Instrumentality of the Book

Presenter:  Andrew Piper, Associate Professor, German Studies, McGill University

 

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What kind of knowledge instrument is a book? This talk will revisit the instrumental nature of books – the way they shape readers’ knowledge of their world – by focusing on the changing nature of instrumental environments during the Romantic period. Whether through a reader’s personalized relationship with a book or the book’s passage through a broader circuit of communication, books are most often understood as singular, bound objects, ones that delineate material, subjective, and epistemic closures. These closures arguably came to be constitutive of the moment we call Romanticism. Piper explores what it would mean instead to understand the book’s place within a larger material ecology of instrumentation. How does an understanding of the book within a broader horizon of epistemic things and our gestural interactions with those things give us new insights not only into the history of the book’s meaning as an instrument of knowledge, but the knowledge environments in which it participates? How can we imagine the book as part of, or as opposed to, the history of scientific instrumentation?

 

 

Refreshments will be provided.