I'm putting together a collection of books and articles that have helped shape my thinking about Bookfuturism. Insofar as there's an intellectual or critical scaffolding for all of this, these are the writers who've provided it. Here's what I wrote about Derrida's 2005 book Paper Machine a few months ago (1, 2):

What can I say about Jacques Derrida’s book Paper Machine, besides “I adore this book, and wish every­one would read it”? 

It’s the great French-Algerian philosopher’s most impor­tant look at the trans­for­ma­tion of the writ­ten word through elec­tronic and com­put­ing tech­nolo­gies. It’s also one of his most impor­tant looks back at his own career; he revis­its and updates a thou­sand and one of his ear­lier ideas and posi­tions from the point of view of trans­for­ma­tions in writ­ing tech­nol­ogy. “It seems as if I’ve never had any other sub­ject, but paper, paper, paper,” he half-jokes — know­ing that philo­soph­i­cal decon­struc­tion was/is as much a func­tion of a tech­no­log­i­cal epoch on the wane as it was a social/intellectual breakthrough.

“Paper” for Der­rida isn’t just the paper of books, but also iden­tity papers (the French term for undoc­u­mented immi­grants is “sans-papiers,” i.e., with­out papers), news­pa­pers, and printer paper — “Papier-Machine” means “typ­ing paper, printer paper, machine paper,” even as it comes to mean (and I’m here I’m extrap­o­lat­ing) the whole struc­tural edi­fice of a world built on net­works made of paper. William Car­los Williams said that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words”; you could also say that a poem (or a book) is a machine made of paper. 

This ret­ro­spec­tive aspect makes Paper Machine a great intro­duc­tion to Der­rida and his writ­ing, even as it intro­duces new wrin­kles. The man who famously titled a chap­ter in Of Gram­ma­tol­ogy “The End of the Book and the Begin­ning of Writ­ing” has to stop and rethink “what does this mean?” in a world where “the end of the book” (that is, the printed book) is a real pos­si­bil­ity. It’s fun to watch.

Also fun, and given the posi­tions in the book, inevitable — the book has been scanned and OCRed, and is now avail­able at AAAARG.org, aka the best web­site for philosophy/theory PDFs ever. So, please — give it a whirl.

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Most of my favorite quotes in Derrida’s Paper Machine come from the first full chap­ter, “The Book To Come.” (The title is also the title of a book by Mau­rice Blan­chot, and a chap­ter in that book, which is largely about the poet Stéphane Mal­larmé.) Samples:

A ques­tion trem­bling all over, not only with that which dis­turbs the his­tor­i­cal sense of what we still call a book, but also with what the expres­sion to come might imply—namely more than one thing, at least three things: 

1. That the book as such has—or doesn’t have—a future, now that elec­tronic and vir­tual incor­po­ra­tion, the screen and the key­board, online trans­mis­sion, and numer­i­cal com­po­si­tion seem to be dis­lodg­ing or sup­ple­ment­ing the codex (that gath­er­ing of a pile of pages bound together, the cur­rent form of what we gen­er­ally call a book such that it can be opened, put on a table, or held in the hands). The codex had itself sup­planted the vol­ume, the vol­u­men, the scroll. It had sup­planted it with­out mak­ing it dis­ap­pear, I should stress. For what we are deal­ing with is never replace­ments that put an end to what they replace but rather, if I might use this word today, restruc­tura­tions in which the old­est form sur­vives, and even sur­vives end­lessly, coex­ist­ing with the new form and even com­ing to terms with a new economy—which is also a cal­cu­la­tion in terms of the mar­ket as well as in terms of stor­age, cap­i­tal, and reserves.

2. That if it has a future, the book to come will no longer be what it was. 

3. That we are await­ing or hop­ing for an other book, a book to come that will trans­fig­ure or even res­cue the book from the ship­wreck that is hap­pen­ing at present. 

This — espe­cially the first part — is one of my favorite moves, that of the LONG his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive, cou­pled with that crit­i­cal sen­si­bil­ity, bor­rowed from Fer­di­nand de Saussure’s struc­tural­ist lin­guis­tics, that mul­ti­ple terms coex­ist but change and shift in their rel­a­tive val­ues and sig­nif­i­cance as they jos­tle against one another. Lin­guis­tic change is never a straight sub­sti­tu­tion, but a high-friction acco­mo­da­tion to the new. In fact, so is most cul­tural change — the dis­tinc­tion isn’t between live and dead, or even (entirely) high and low, but between forms that are resid­ual, dom­i­nant, or emerging.

But this posi­tion, which could just make for a tidy defla­tion — we’ve seen all of this before — is joined to an acknowl­edge­ment that what we are expe­ri­enc­ing is a ship­wreck. It’s just not (or at least not only) the ship­wreck we think it is:

Now what is hap­pen­ing today, what looks like being the very form of the book’s to-come, still as the book, is on the one hand, beyond the clo­sure of the book, the dis­rup­tion, the dis­lo­ca­tion, the dis­junc­tion, the dis­sem­i­na­tion with no pos­si­ble gath­er­ing, the irre­versible dis­per­sion of this total codex (not its dis­ap­pear­ance but its mar­gin­al­iza­tion or sec­on­dariza­tion, in ways we will have to come back to); but simul­ta­ne­ously, on the other hand, a con­stant rein­vest­ment in the book project, in the book of the world or the world book, in the absolute book (this is why I also described the end of the book as inter­minable or end­less), the new space of writ­ing and read­ing in elec­tronic writ­ing, trav­el­ing at top speed from one spot on the globe to another, and link­ing together, beyond fron­tiers and copy­rights, not only cit­i­zens of the world on the uni­ver­sal net­work of a poten­tial uni­ver­si­tas, but also any reader as a writer, poten­tial or vir­tual or what­ever. That revives a desire, the same desire. It re-creates the temp­ta­tion that is fig­ured by the World Wide Web as the ubiq­ui­tous Book finally recon­sti­tuted, the book of God, the great book of Nature, or the World Book finally achieved in its onto-theological dream, even though what it does is to repeat the end of
that book as to-come. 

These are two fan­tas­matic lim­its of the book to come, two extreme, final, eschatic fig­ures of the end of the book, the end as death, or the end as telos or achieve­ment. We must take seri­ously these two fan­tasies; what’s more they are what makes writ­ing and read­ing hap­pen. They remain as irre­ducible as the two big ideas of the book, of the book both as the unit of a mate­r­ial sup­port in the world, and as the unity of a work or unit of dis­course (a book in the book). But we should also per­haps wake up to the neces­sity that goes along with these fantasies. 

Two fan­tasies! Both gen­er­a­tive! Both prob­a­bly unavoidable! 

This is why Der­rida is so good.