Do You Have a Gutenberg Brain?

Huntsville is very proud of Lowe Mill, its arts center. I took a typesetting class there a few weeks ago, which got me thinking about the printed word. I went just to see what it felt like to pick up the blocks (the type) with your hands and place them deliberately and ink them and see the finished product. Sonja Rossow owns the printing studio and does a great job of leading a jump-in-and-do-it class for beginners. The vintage press was American-made, but it's impossible not to think of Gutenberg after all those years of living in Mainz.  The same week, I read an article in Harper's Magazine (October 13th, 2018) called "The Printed Word in Peril" by Will Self. (https://harpers.org/archive/2018/10/the-printed-word-in-peril/). Self introduces Marshall McLuhan's concept of the Gutenberg mind. I'm pretty sure I have one--I worked hard for it, try to maintain it, hope it is plumping up again after shrinking to the size of a raisin teaching college for too many years. But does it really matter if you have a Gutenberg mind or not? It's an issue I've wrestled with a lot over the last year or two, and I agree with those who say that something fundamentally human--at least human as we've known it for centuries now--is at stake when we write and read and print on paper.

So I learned you set your type, backwards of course, then fill in the spaces with pieces of wood or metal called furniture. After mixing the ink and inking the press, we ran our prints. I'm sure I've used imprecise terms, but you get the point. The finished product appears below. . .

It's common knowledge that moveable type opened up access to the printed word. At least the minority who could afford books might be able to purchase them or view them (as opposed to the rare and painstakingly scriptum-produced volumes) thanks to Gutenberg. Printed texts meant reading and thinking for yourself, especially about Christianity.

But there is always someone who mourns the loss of what came before. Book arts and letter arts remind us of the world even before Gutenberg, when highly-trained individuals spent countless hours copying and binding religious and secular texts. If you have every spent even a few moments fooling around with modern calligraphy and lettering, you will develop a sense of awe for the intense labor it must have required to preserve knowledge from antiquity before moveable type. Almost unimaginable. For example, Cassiodorus founded the scriptorium Vivarium in the 6th century which copied Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, along with many other texts. (Letter Arts Review 32:2 has an article on Cassiodorus.) As Marlene Chan points out, we'll never know what would have been lost if not for undertakings like Cassiodorus's. Stephen Greenblatt won a Pulitzer Prize for The Swerve,  a narrative which traces just that, knowledge that was almost lost. I had to chuckle when Chan writes that "Gutenberg's notoriety and posterity overshadows that of Cassiordus" and that "Gutenberg's achievement upstages the crucial role earlier scribes--and monasteries such as Vivarium--played in preserving and disseminating knowledge in the medieval world" (37, 39).

She's not wrong (I chuckled because I love her passion, protecting the reputation of a medieval figure!). What would there have been for Gutenberg to print if the knowledge had been lost? Educated minds were rigorously trained in the liberal arts, and this training involved memorizing and passing knowledge on orally, as well as the rarer written word. You hear the same tone of under-appreciation (is that the right word?) in Will Self's article on the lamentable transition to digital print. I probably wouldn't get it, if I hadn't been teaching for the last twenty-five years, really the last five in particular. Most students no longer have the ability to follow words on a page for pages on end. They cannot trace arguments or handle references to something outside the text, either by looking it up or deciding it's not necessary for the larger meaning in context. They just don't get any further in the text. Will Self worries that the novel as a means of narration and a particular experience of self will disappear, or even that what it is to be a self is threatened. Matthew Crawford writes eloquently on this. If you cannot sit with yourself and have the discipline to read a text and engage and reflect, then selfhood is not what it was. You have to be separate from something as well as interact with it in order to be a self.

But in both instances, with the advent of the printing press and writing in the digital age, something is gained, a point Self seems to recognize more directly than Chan, although begrudgingly. It is difficult to weigh the pros and cons of cultural transition. Scriptorium to printing press, printing press to digital: A larger audience is won in both instances. And a more diverse audience is reached. Is this a watering down, a "kidult" culture (a reference to childish reading for adults, as Self calls the Harry Potter series)? Maybe, but more people use words now, if only for texting, than would have been the case when Self and I were children, even if there are fewer Gutenberg minds around. One can enjoy reading Harry Potter and Marshall McLuhan or Goethe, I think. Self's larger point is that a Gutenberg mind is one that can think autonomously. Is that even possible if your smartphone is telling you what to buy as you check to see who just texted you?

In the context of the Gutenberg mind, the text I chose to print is suddenly fitting.