Moving the mouse cursor over the top of the page will display the menu bar.
In our exploration of the spatiality of language and, specifically, the activation of the site where writing "makes" rather than takes place, we propose a multilayered experience of the book as an object as well as a geometrical, topological and especially a performative space, which we understand as an "ecology of the book". Further expanding this practice beyond the book's margins, yet at the same time, embedding it in the material and technical affordance of the book's medial articulations, we evoke a "new" ecology: one that unfolds with the interaction-landscape and its actual and invented inhabitants, as well as the techniques of its production. Texts, drawings, figures, figurations, methods, human and non-human authors weave the heterogeneous texture of the book's "new" ecology. In our monographs, "Fauna. Language Arts and the New Order of Imaginary Animals" (2018), "Flora. Language Arts in the Age of Information" (2020), and "Fiction Fiction. Language Arts and the Practice of Spatial Storytelling" (2023, De Gruyter/Edition Angewandte), we explore and map the territory of language arts: on the one hand in transgressing traditional scientific methodologies and models from thinking-of-the-other into thinking-with-the-other, and on the other hand with and through the agency of our eponymous characters. Applying Michel Serres' methodology of thinking by inventing personae, Fauna and Flora operate on and percolate through the margins of text (written, figural) and space (concrete, fictional), reconfiguring the notion of authorship and placing literary texts and digital drawings within the frame(less) collective of more-than-human and more-than-organic actants.
This page contains media that is intended to start playback automatically on opening. This may include sound. Your browser is blocking automated playback. Please click here to start media.
We enter a book like we enter a room. Here, we do not rely on the promise of the geometrically describable volume of the book-object and its cuboid extension build of walls and angles. Even if the dialogue of the spatial diagonal is only sometimes measurable, its predictability does not tell the whole story. In the book-room we encounter expected and unexpected multiplicities: the layers emerging from the expected, numbered pages and the startling unexpectedness of positions and positioning. Thus the topological description of the book-room is "becoming-relation-": the book which is yet to come, the "becoming book with-"... This is not a question of orientation but of co–ordination. Is there a new point of spatial reference? A new centre? However, the capacity of mathematical describability – geometrical or topological – is troubled by the book-body.
In "Times of Crises" Michel Serres defines ecology as an "inextricably difficult discipline". Not as much as an ideological and political science but as a discipline which includes all life forms (and their sciences): "everything that is caused and causing, coded and coding." A gesture of inclusion is undoubtedly a risky and turbulent matter – its spatial articulation, as risky and turbulent, as bumpy and unpredictable. A spatiality fragmented in locations, positions, directions, layers, embedded in harmonious and friendly, as well as turbulent and uncomfortable patches, the margins of which do not fit together. Tracing these margins, we create a map, which is as real as the "world" itself, similar to the one in Borges’s fictional account "Of Exactitude in Science" – a map as big as the land it traces. Borges’s map envelops the land, which it is supposed to measure like a skin. Map and landscape touch one another as tightly, as accurately, and rigorously so that the distance between them – in scale or meaning – evaporates.
Michel Serres: Times of Crisis: What the Financial Crisis Revealed and How to Reinvent our Lives and Future [Translation: Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon]. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing 2014 [2009], p. 61-62.
Jorge Luis Borges: "Of Exactitude in Science". In: A Universal History of Infamy [Translation: Norman Thomas di Giovanni]. Penguin Books 1975, p.131.
The book-body transcends the borders of its geometrical self: We are captured by its rhythm, which merges with the rhythm of our own bodies: writing, reading, walking. The book-body, informed by the multilayered spatio-textual experience of its geometrical-topological articulations, invents, produces and performs an environment in which it is embedded. There, it encounters other book-bodies – dancing and pulsating in the pace of their referentiality. There, theory is a matter of matter, of sliding and percolation. This environment does not circle around a centre but spaces itself in the hyperpolyphonic word-worldscapes inhabited by our books. It is instead a ramble-ment – a rumbling ramble-ment – sliding along, walking with and strolling around a plethora of layers, functions, fictions, frictions, species and materialities. There, sound and noise mimic each other.
Two theoretical influences co-constitute our approach to an "ecology of the book": The Material Ecocriticism of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (particularly the notion of "matter-text", coined by Başak Ağin) and the understanding of ecology by Michel Serres. The field of ecocriticism measures the correspondence between "word-world" and "actual world", or with the words of Laurence Buell, ecocriticism is about "the matching or non-matching of wordscape and worldscape that takes quite varied forms". Material Ecocriticism questions this differentiation, considering the articulation of matter not only in a text but as a text. "Mattertext" is, therefore, the text-body, embedded in the world-matter.
Our maps are "more-than-texts". That reminds us of the primordial textures of space which emerge from the practice of tracing, of walking, of writing. We are weaving these ancient spatial practices anew. ("There is nothing quite so old as the gesture of making new", declares Christopher Watkin.) As a porous membrane between the world and the place of its textual production, our "more-than-texts" unfold as a space-skin. Is this space-skin the de-centered, distributed spatiality – and practice – of a new ecology?
Başak Ağin: »Animated Film as an Eloquent Body: Seth Boyden’s ›An Object at Rest‹ as Mattertext«. In: Manisa Celal Bayar University Journal of Social Sciences. Environment and Literature Special Issue, Vol. 16, Nr. 1-2, 2018, S.27-45.
Lawrence Buell: The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Blackwell 2005, p.39.
