Environmental Composition: Tan Lin's Infrastructuralist Idea of the Book

Abstract

Environmental Composition:Tan Lin's Infrastructuralist Idea of the Book Karin Nygård (bio) Blessed are they who know how to read infrastructure. —John Durham Peters1 In a reader's report commissioned by Wesleyan University Press in connection with their prospective publication of experimental poet TAN LIN'S idiosyncratically titled Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004, The Joy of Cooking: Airport Novel Musical Poem Painting Film Photo Landscape (2010), an anonymous reviewer, while enthusiastically recommending the manuscript for publication, also notes that the work's bewildering order makes it difficult to "conceive of the book" in its "unbound pages."2 Published as part of a freestanding Appendix prepared in connection with an event dedicated to the collaborative "expansion" of Seven Controlled Vocabularies the reviewer's assessment—here compiled alongside an "Expanded Preface," an isolated footnote from an article about the entanglements of literature and technoscience, a scant definition of Markov chains, and a collection of [End Page 163] various indexes to LIN'S book—would seem to betray an uneasiness with the work's already expansive nature, the recommendation being that "this book needs binding" so that "the strange little corners" of its pages can be "secured in place."3 However, that we stretch ourselves to conceive of the book as extending beyond the space of its bound pages is precisely what this work challenges us to do. Indeed, the notion of the boundedness of the book—traditionally seen as its defining characteristic—is very much at stake in Lin's work, something that furthermore challenges our intuitive sense that a book's reading too is bound, the sense of book-bound reading as a reading that is "restricted or confined to a specified place"—to the bounded space of the book, that is.4 In expanding and exploding our ideas of the nature of this space, the work of Lin amounts to—and further invites—a reconsideration of the book amid current notions of an expanded field of literary inscription.5 Seeking to contribute to the explorations of this field, the current essay considers the stakes of a veritable field approach to the book.6 Indeed, to borrow a designation from the section titles of Seven Controlled Vocabularies, this is a book that can be said to function as a "field guide" to the book as a field, a manual of sorts, on environmental reading. For if we may have been inclined to think of the book as a bounded site of inscription, Lin instead unfolds it as a multisited infrastructure—that is, as a technology of relation that by its definition exceeds the single site.7 Hence, even though it is performed by Lin within the context of literature, Lin's is an exploration of the book that requires us to move beyond the familiar frameworks of literary studies, crossing into the domains of media studies, library and information science, and science and technology studies—fields that offer crucial concepts for an understanding of the book's infrastructural conditions. Moreover, drawing on media scholar John Durham Peters's notion of "infrastructuralism"—which is loosely outlined by [End Page 164] him as a materialist framework that is sensitive to the environmental nature of media—Lin's idea of the book will be exposed as an emphatically infrastructuralist one.8 To conceptualize this, I further rely on Susan Leigh Star's classic and radically relational definition of infrastructure, which allows us replace the notions of the book's "boundedness" with the idea of it as a boundary space—a space of relation and connection.9 A point of departure for Lin's work is his perception that today, the book is fully integrated into the environment of networked media, a perception prompting intriguing questions of how it might be accessed and read as such.10 Helping us move beyond the question of the relevance of the book in what, in Lin's terms, is our "post-book," "post-reading" environment, Seven Controlled Vocabularies will be seen as offering this old medium to new modes of articulation and understanding.11 Further exposed here as a means of "reading" our contemporary media environment, the work of Lin will finally be taken...