The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

history of the document as the history of the Great Documents (for instance the Declaration of Independence, the 1886 Universal Copyright Convention or the Hayes Code of 1930, to give some just examples almost chosen at random) in her book. What she is interested in is the type of document that is so ubiquitous that it has become almost invisible, although its social, cultural, political and ideological implications are dramatically strong and all-intruding. All case studies in the book have to do with the ways in which industrial societies actually use techniques to reproduce documents (and one sees immediately how this perspective brings in elements of transmediality and cross-formatting). In the four chapters of the book, Gitelman studies commercial or “job-printing” in the late 19th century, the typescript books of the 1930s, the Xerox machine and finally today’s PDF. These objects and practices are not only vernacular in the sense that Gitelman’s study leads us from the world of High Culture and Great Learning to the workplace, the workshop, the office, the garage, the basement and the manifold places where public and private spaces are intertwined. They are also vernacular in the sense that the author pays attention to objects, people, machines and institutions that have been forgotten or that often stay under the radar of traditional media history and theory. (New media historians are now redisclosing these for the great joy and benefit of the public. Philosopher Siegfried Zielinski and media archeologist Erkki Huhtamo [3] come easily to mind.) As already stated, the third keyword, which may resume all the other ones, is “history. ” What kind of historical approach is Gitelman defending as well as illustrating? First of all, it should be underlined that the ambitions of the book, which takes as its starting point the post–Civil War era and as its ending point our current fascination with fan culture, are not to offer a complete historical overview of the document as a genre. Gitelman explicitly rejects any kind of global or universal reading of the document, which often reduces the rich fabric of medium, genre and format to sweeping overgeneralizations (themselves frequently narrowed down to para-Hegelian schemes: orality, the Gutenberg galaxy, digital culture). Variations of this scheme can be found in the work of many great authors (McLuhan, of course, but also Kittler and Debray, for instance). Necessary and useful as these generalizations may be, they cannot do justice to the cultural density and complexity of media history. By insisting on the reproduction of the document, Gitelman raises fundamental issues on access and the way in which the uses of documents define and redefine the relationships between producers and consumers. In her approach, job printing, for instance, cannot be separated from the invention of small letterpress machines that broke the monopoly of the traditional printer (and that redefined at the same time the old distinction between manuscript and print). In the same vein, typescript books are studied against the background of the microfilm revolution and the introduction of fair use reappropriation of copyrighted material, while the Xerox machine is presented as a wonderful example, the mechanisms of which are well known to all those familiar with science and technology studies (television and telephone would be similar cases), of a technology that ends up being used in ways that are quite distinct from those that its inventors had in mind and whose impact can only become clear when reframed in its historical context (in this case the Cold War and debates on secrecy and espionage). In all cases, Gitelman offers a meticulous reconstruction of the historical context of the media changes she foregrounds, and in many regards this book is a real Wunderkammer. At the same time, however, the author always scrutinizes the past in order to show what it can mean for us today. Here the political dimension of the book comes to the fore, for Paper Knowledge is also a passionate discussion of what knowing and showing are about, namely the possibility to produce, share and debate knowledge in a society to open this knowledge to all of its members. Thanks to technology, this possibility is no longer determined by those who know and show and those who don’t.