Abstract
In an extended reading of the stop-motion animation films such as “The Joy of Books” (2012) by Sean and Lisa Ohlenkamp, Jessica Pressman examines contemporary culture’s obsessive preoccupation with the material book as a form of melancholic fetishism object. Building on her widely recognized concept of “bookishness”, Pressman argues that in times of the book’s supposed obsolescence, popular culture fetishizes the printed book in ways that inspire new ways of seeing, using, and appreciating books, with and through digital technologies.
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Notes
- 1.
The first stop-motion film by the creators of “The Joy of Books ,” Sean and Lisa Ohlenkamp, was titled “Organizing the Bookcase” (2011) and focused on this one aspect: moving books around on a bookshelf. https://youtu.be/zhRT-PM7vpA
- 2.
Charlie White, “Remarkable ‘Joy of Books’ Animation Brings Books to Life,” Mashable, January 29, 2012, http://mashable.com/2012/01/29/joy-of-books-viral-video/#enW6FT77BGqI
- 3.
William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish I,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 9 (Spring 1985): 5.
- 4.
For a history of the fetish concept, see William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish,” wherein he writes, “the fetish, as an idea and a problem, and as a novel object not proper to any prior discrete society, originated in the cross-cultural spaces of the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (5). In Fetishism and Culture: A Different Theory of Modernity (trans. Anna Galt; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), Hartmut Böhme contends, “fetishism was above all a European phenomenon” (187). He locates a shift in the nineteenth century, when fetishism becomes less about the foreign other and more about a changing European relationship to things due to industrialization and capitalism.
- 5.
Böhme, Fetishism, 5.
- 6.
For scholarship that addresses and critiques the theory of medial succession, see Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, eds. New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006). On the very real technological infrastructures that enable the appearance of the ethereal Cloud, see Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham: Duke UP, 2015) and Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, eds. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015). For a media archaeological history of the Cloud, see Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015).
- 7.
Pietz, “Problem of Fetish,” 7.
- 8.
See Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1964), 243–261; and “Fetishism” (1927), in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, Trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 214–219.
- 9.
See D.W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—A Study of the First Not-Me Possession,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34 (1953): 89–97.
- 10.
Writing about what he calls “bibliographic mourning,” Andrew Piper states, “Just as the imagination of how to transcend books has been integral to the history of books, so too is a sense of melancholy, a persistent sense of loss”; he continues, “Melancholy isn’t a sign of the book’s end; it is its inspiration. Melancholy is reading’s muse” (153). Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
- 11.
E.L. McCallum, Object Lessons: How to do Things with Fetishism (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), xiv. In Freudian psychoanalysis, the fetish serves an important symbolic role in the development of the individual subject. In “Fetishism” (1927) Freud writes, “the fetish is a penis-substitute” (qtd. in McCallum, 15). When a boy first recognizes that his mother lacks a penis, he registers the act of castration personally, for “if a woman can be castrated then his own penis is in danger” (qtd. in McCallum, 29). In an act of self-defense, the “horror of castration sets up a sort of permanent memorial to itself by creating this substitute” (206), and this substitution results in a fetish that is both a signifier and an archive of that which was lost; see Sigmund Freud’s “Fetishism” (1927), in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, Trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).
- 12.
Naomi Schor, “Fetishism and its Ironies,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 97.
- 13.
Thomas Keenan, “The Point is to (ex)Change it: Reading Capital, Rhetorically,” in Apter and Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, 174. In their preface to the volume, Emily Apter and William Pietz write, “Fetishism has been a key word in the cultural discourse through which ‘developed’ societies have identified themselves by characterizing their Others” (ix).
- 14.
Robert Stoller concisely concludes, “a fetish is a story masquerading as an object.” Robert J. Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 155.
- 15.
In Lacan’s 1966 lecture on “Psychoanalysis and Medicine,” he writes, “there is jouissance at the level at which pain begins to appear, and we know that it is only at this level of pain that a whole dimension of the organism, which would otherwise remain veiled, can be experienced.” Jacques Lacan, “Psychoanalysis and Medicine,” (1966), qtd. in Nestor Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 102–115.
- 16.
Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
- 17.
Charles Musser reminds us, “Although the cinema was to become known affectionately as ‘the movies’ or ‘the flicks,’ in the 1890s and early 1900s it was called ‘animated photographs’” (Emergence of Cinema, 1).
- 18.
See the exhibition dedicated to Tim Burton at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (November 22, 2009–April 26, 2010), which describes Burton as having “reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking.” https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/313
- 19.
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 91 and 90, respectively. The prospect of losing human labor in the age of computational automation, biotech, and the posthuman is implicated here. Ngai focuses her analysis of stop-animation techniques on depictions of the human and, in particular, the “racialized animatedness” of African-Americans as “excessively ‘lively’ or ‘agitated’” (93), arguing that “to be ‘animated’ in American culture is to be racialized in some way” (95).
- 20.
Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 91.
- 21.
Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 91.
- 22.
Carly Maga, “Making His Ode to Joy of Books,” Torontoist, January 11, 2012, https://torontoist.com/2012/01/making-his-ode-to-joy-of-books/
- 23.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 3. Vaidhyanathan means that while we think we are the users and consumers of Google, the company is actually using our online activity: “We—our fancies, fetishes, predilections, and preferences—are what Google sells to advertisers” (3).
- 24.
It is relevant for understanding the capitalist forces shaping bookish relationships that YouTube, where “The Joy of Books ” is hosted, was purchased by Google in 2006.
- 25.
Mark McGurl, “Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 (September 2016): 447.
- 26.
McGurl, “Everything,” 448.
- 27.
See Trebor Scholz, ed., Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (New York: Routledge, 2012).
- 28.
Laura Miller, in her history of twentieth-century American book retail, shows that Amazon built its online book retail business upon the successful model previously used in mail-order sales, so “Books were a logical choice for an e-commerce experiment” (52). Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
- 29.
Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 6.
- 30.
Striphas, The Late Age of Print, 9.
- 31.
Striphas, The Late Age of Print, 16.
- 32.
Indeed, Sean Ohlenkamp is “A Toronto ad man.” https://torontoist.com/2012/01/making-his-ode-to-joy-of-books/
- 33.
See Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867), section 4 “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.”
- 34.
The video was shot at Toronto’s Type bookstore, and when asked why he selected that particular location for filming, Sean Ohlenkamp responded, “they’re an independent brick-and-mortar store and when you’re talking about real books, they add a level of creativity, charm and a human touch to it all.” Melody Lau, “Q&A: Sean Ohlenkamp, the man behind Type’s viral ‘Joy of Books’ video.” National Post, January 10, 2012, http://nationalpost.com/afterword/qa-sean-ohlenkamp-the-man-behind-types-viral-joy-of-books-video
- 35.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 26.
- 36.
See Lisa Gitelman, “Print Culture (Other Than Codex): Job Printing and its Importance,” in Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, ed. N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 183–200. See also Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge: Toward a History of Media Documents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
- 37.
Liz Button “Stores Find Holiday Success with Unique Non-Book Items,” American Booksellers Association (Jan. 22, 2015). http://www.bookweb.org/news/stores-find-holiday-success-unique-non-book-items
- 38.
Butler continues, “But what if Aretha were singing to me? Or what if she were singing to a drag queen whose performance somehow confirmed her own?” Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 307–320, 317.
- 39.
In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), Sara Ahmed describes such a reading practice as a kind of queering: “To queer phenomenology is to offer a different ‘slant’ to the concept of orientation itself” (4).
- 40.
Jack (Judith) Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.
- 41.
Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 45.
- 42.
Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 45.
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Pressman, J. (2019). “There’s Nothing Quite Like a Real Book”: Stop-Motion Bookishness. In: Schaefer, H., Starre, A. (eds) The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22545-2_8
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