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Petrus Ramus and the Space of the Book (ENGL 333)
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Petrus Ramus and the Space of the Book (ENGL 333)
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Lecture 4: Petrus Ramus and the Space of the BookJanuary 16th, 2023
Media and Perception
For Aristotle, the perception was an effect of mediation
● To hear, there must be air between the eardrum and the cochlea
● Between the iris and the retina, there must be water
● Whereas other philosophers had argued that these mediating substances were not
important, Aristotle argued that they were materially important—without them,
perception would not exist
Who Was Petrus Ramus?
Ramus was an education reformer who lived from 1515 to 1572 in France
● In his pedagogy, Ramus advocated the use of spatial configuration as a way of
understanding knowledge systems
● This produced a spatial logic of lineation and juxtaposition, and it is out of this theoretical
matrix that the movable book emerges
○ Where did he get the lineation from? Printing! Knowledge must, therefore, go in a
line (although no human being thinks in a line)
■ This is taking the idea of knowledge production and forcing a model on it.
■ The victims of this design were students – taking young and malleable
minds, turning them into boxes, and stuffing them!
● What’s important about him is that he sought to put information in a spatial
configuration/orientation (he was largely an idiot)
○ Petrus Ramus wanted absolute knowledge to be fixed, stable, and unchanging
● As soon as we started printing books, we had a reverse “flip” to manuscripts
Electronic media is returning to an oral culture (dialogue, Zoom chat) – media culture is circular
Movable Texts as Supplements
Flaps and foldouts (etc.) can thus be understood in terms of Jacques Derrida’s concept of the
supplement – as “an addition from the outside, but it can be understood as supplying what is
missing and in this way is already inscribed within that to which it is added”
● All books are like this – the book pretends to be bounded and absolute, but it isn’t
complete (otherwise there wouldn’t be 10,000 books on Hamlet)
● Until about 1880, it was assumed that oral history wasn’t history (all of these prejudices
emerge out of the idea of bounded writing)
○ When we enter out of flaps and foldouts, we enter a political situation (to break
out of bounded writing is to disagree and challenge it)
Movable Texts as Paratexts
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