Between book and cinema: late Victorian new media

Abstract

The origins of new media can be located in the late 19th century, in the visual archive of this period. This antecedent of today's new media appeared first within the pages of the printed book and article, and its origin is related to the increasingly database style of organization of print media at this time. The organizational form of the visual archive that appeared within such printed pages, however, can also be connected to developments in the moral sciences, in particular, the investigation by physiologists of the material foundations of both vision and of thought. As both the eye and the brain became part of the same physical model, so the visual archive came to include both the database itself, and its organizational frame, within a single image.

Notes

Simon Cook studied late 19th-century intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. He is currently a postdoctoral Mellon fellow at Duke University, where he is working on a book-length manuscript investigating the economic dimensions of visual modernism and the visual dimensions of late 19th-century economic science.

¹If, in the early Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov, Manovich has found ‘a major “database filmmaker” of the 20th century’ (Manovich 2001: xxiv), then it is worthwhile noting that Vertov's approach to cinema was fundamentally that of a Leninist social scientist who regarded his camera as an epistemological instrument capable of rendering visible aspects of the social fabric invisible to the naked eye (on Vertov's scientism see Michelson 1992).

²For an early but thorough discussion of this issue see Howes 1895. I would like to thank Rachel Stroumsa for this point.

³I have been unable to find any scholarly studies concerning the history of the form of the printed book in the 19th century. The information in the main text has been culled from various articles contained in the journal for professional indexers – The Indexer.

⁴On the history of graphs in this period see Hankins 1999.

⁵Some of the classic texts in this debate are E. Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982; M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1962; W. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London and New York, Methuen, 1982; E. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1980 (which is highly critical of McLuhan); and R. Pattison, On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1982 (which argues against Havelock, Ong and McLuhan).

⁶It was only in the 19th century that books changed their function from – in Graham's words – ‘vehicles by which writers might speak to absent audiences' to ‘silent repositories of information’ (Graham 1993 [1987]: 18). Graham charts his way through this long literacy debate in order to draw an upper limit to his historical treatment of written and spoken religious scripture, and from this point of view post-Victorian religious sensibility has arrived at a moment of crisis because a visual relationship of subjectivity to text has replaced the traditional oral–written culture of the word. Modern Western literacy, in other words, has since the 19th century become a visual literacy; and visual literacy entails a rupture in the traditional immediacy of the word. The advent of a purely visual literacy necessitates, then, a new kind of textual mediation between the subject and the object of text.

⁷For a useful summary of this development of physiological research into the second part of the 19th century see White 1994.

⁸The term ‘information’ is indeed appropriate here, for following the reduction of mathematics to logic by Russell and Whitehead at the turn of the century, the principles of logic were understood as grounding not simply the meaning of written and spoken words, but rather the meaning of any symbolic language at all. The convergence of word and image perhaps finds its apogee in the picture theory of meaning set out in Wittgenstein's Tractatus of 1921.

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Notes on contributors

Simon Cook

Simon Cook studied late 19th-century intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. He is currently a postdoctoral Mellon fellow at Duke University, where he is working on a book-length manuscript investigating the economic dimensions of visual modernism and the visual dimensions of late 19th-century economic science.