Time and the Bibliographer: A Meditation on the Spirit of Book Studies

Matt Cohen

doi:10.14434/textual.v13i1.30077

Abstract

In light of the global return of tribalism, racism, nationalism, and religious hypocrisy to power’s center stage, it is worth returning to the question of the relevance of bibliography. It is a time when, at least at the seats of power in the United States and some other places, books seem to have become almost meaningless. Bibliographic pioneer D.F. McKenzie’s strategy was not to constrain bibliography in self-defense, but to expand it, to go on the offense. What is our course? This essay explores bibliography’s past in order to suggest ways in which it can gain from an engagement with the methods and motivating concerns of Indigenous studies. The study of books has often functioned within a colonialist set of assumptions about its means and its ends, but at the same time, having been at times in something of a marginalized position themselves in their professions, its practitioners have developed unique tools, passions, and intellectual focuses with decolonial potential. That unusual “spirit”, in dialogue with Native people and Indigenous ideas — about media, about what constitutes a “process”, and about the historical and political meanings of recorded forms — may be key to transforming the imagination of the study of books and to enriching its place in the world.

Highlights

In light of the global return of tribalism, racism, nationalism, and religious hypocrisy to power’s center stage, it is worth returning to the question of the relevance of bibliography
The title of my essay, with its allusion to Johannes Fabian’s book Time and the Other, positions the bibliographer as the aboriginal Other — stuck in an earlier time, unable fully to engage the present, and destined, if not to disappearance, to irrelevance. It is intended as a double provocation: to center the varieties of media temporalities, and to spur thought about the dependence of bibliography upon conceptions of time that may be less colonially coordinated than internally inconsistent
In today’s moment, with the global return of tribalism, racism, nationalism, and religious hypocrisy to power’s center stage, it is worth returning to the question of the relevance of bibliography

Summary

The Spirit of Bibliography

It would seem that McKenzie, in his landmark essay on the Treaty of Waitangi between the English and the Maori in New Zealand, addressed back in the 1980s the concerns I have been describing about bibliography’s modes of complicity with colonialism. McKenzie’s declaration that bibliography can “show the human presence in any recorded text” (1986, 29) sings to those systematically suppressed by Western colonialism — but not because of a simple rejection of the Western scholarly commonplace of the irrecoverable past, or a fetishization of material objects over the abstraction of the text, as has been the stereotype. It is because of a history of complicity that bibliography and its practitioners have instantiated mostly at the level of method, of evidentiary selection, and of historiographical practice. It may instead be a matter of considering basic professional, social, and methodological assumptions of the field on one hand, and on the other, of considering how these have sustained a certain technical and emotional orientation of the field that is in keeping with its animating spirits of humanism, of preservation, and of maintaining a community of fellowfeeling around the material legacies of textuality

What Can Bibliography Do?

Perhaps Damaged Survivors

Works Cited