Pellucid Paper by Adam Wickberg

PELLUCID PAPER BY ADAM WICKBERG Pellucid Paper Bureaucratic Media And Poetry In Early Modern Spain Technographies Series Editors: Steven Connor, David Trotter and James Purdon How was it that technology and writing came to inform each other so exten- sively that today there is only information? Technographies seeks to answer that question by putting the emphasis on writing as an answer to the large question of ‘through what?’. Writing about technographies in history, our con- tributors will themselves write technographically. Pellucid Paper Bureaucratic Media And Poetry In Early Modern Spain Adam Wickberg OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS London 2018 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2018 Copyright © 2018 Adam Wickberg This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or simi- lar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Freely available at: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/pellucid-paper/ Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restrictions. Cover Illustration © 2018 Navine G. Khan-Dossos Print ISBN 978-1-78542-054-2 PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-055-9 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org Contents Acknowledgements 11 Introduction: Paper Fever 13 Historico-Philosophical Interlude 1 52 1. The Materiality of Golden Age Poetry: Between Manuscript and Print 55 Historico-Philosophical Interlude 2 114 2. On Spheres and Spaces: In the Gallery 118 Historico-Philosophical Interlude 3 176 3. Poetry as Memory Practice: In the Face of Death 180 Conclusion 240 Bibliography 243 Index 261 Quod non est in actis, non est in mundo Philip II of Spain For Mira and Ella Acknowledgements There are many people I should thank for contributing to the coming into existence of this book following the five years of research that lie behind it. But as academic acknowledgements tend to get very long, I will try to keep it as short as possible. I want to thank Anders Cullhed for supervising me during my PhD years and all my colleagues at Stockholm University. I thank Mercedes Blanco for coming to Stockholm and providing an excellent opposition at my thesis defence. I also want to thank Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht for supervising my dissertation for a year at Stanford University. I want to thank John Durham Peters for many valuable comments and encouragement in the process of turning the dissertation into a book. I also owe thanks to my brilliant editors at Open Humanities Press, James Purdon, Steven Connor, and David Trotter, for working so generously with the manuscript. Above all, I want to thank my partner Mira Stolpe Törneman, also a scholar of media history, who generously has provided me with the most ingenious and exciting ideas from beginning to end, many of which now form part of this book. It is a huge understatement to say that without her, this book would never have been written. Introduction: Paper Fever On 12 December 1628 Don Antonio Chacon handed over a luxuriously produced manuscript of calfskin parchment to its dedicatee, the Count-Duke of Olivares. This meticulously calligraphed manuscript in three volumes brought together the complete poems of the poet Luis de Góngora, who had died the year before. In it, the poet and the collector had arranged the poems chronologically and according to genre, and had provided the circumstances of composition for each poem. Olivares, who was the First Minister of Philip IV, had desired the works of Góngora for his exclusive library. By the time of his death Góngora had become the most sought-after poet of the Spanish Golden Age without ever having had his poetry printed. Thus the existence of this material object raises a number of questions with regard to early modern media and cultural techniques. If the only book fully supervised by the poet was destined for a private library and only produced after his death, where and how did this poetry exist for contemporary readers? This material aspect of Golden Age poetry has primarily attracted editors and philologists who have carried out the important task of making it available today through critical editions. The conceptual object of poetry, however, has often been taken for granted, as if its existence as linguistic entity were self-evident, universal, and transhistorical. In reality, the opposite is true. Every poem needs to be perpetually stored in such a manner that its user can access it: a particular problem if the author has refrained from producing any such object. The aim of this book is to investigate Góngora and the cultural production of his time by analyzing media as cultural techniques, which logically precede the symbolic and conceptual objects that can subsequently be extracted from them (such as an intentional authorial meaning). The media and materiality of early modern Spain are not used to explain the poetry of the time, nor is the poetry employed to explain historical circumstances. Indeed, the distinction between ‘poetry’ and other ‘contexts’ is rejected from the very outset as a product of a modern epistemology which the study seeks to overcome. In understanding poetic writing as ‘technography’, Pellucid Paper traces poetry back to its material conditions, both in terms of storage and in terms of a general material culture of which it inevitably forms part, and sheds new light on early modern cultural techniques. The Chacon manuscript is an important actor in this network, providing a point of departure for the three main chapters. 14 Introduction A further motivation for a materially-oriented understanding of early modern culture is the importance that is continually ascribed to material objects in historical sources. Issues of storage and perpetuation were urgent around 1600 in Spain, and, as will be shown, were related to the concepts of vanitas and memento mori. Vanitas is Latin for vanity, and refers in early modern culture to the transient nature of earthly existence. Memento mori, literally ‘remember you shall die’, is an associated (medieval Christian) reflection on mortality. The issue of the ephemeral quality of human existence and its relation to time, which found its symbolic expression in Stilleben paintings of skulls and hourglasses, can be understood in relation to the urge to use material media to store words and images in perpetuity. The book will thus unveil a dynamic relationship between the death-oriented aesthetics of vanitas, techniques and media of storage, and a form of mediated presence that permeates the inseparable spheres of the political and the aesthetic. The early modern Spanish monarchy, which can be described as the first global empire, relied thoroughly on media for its existence and extension. The printing press had by 1600 become quite influential, but it was by no means regarded as unproblematic. Rather, it was heavily regulated and co-existed with the older medium of the manuscript, as did the relatively newer medium of paper and the older medium of parchment. Poetic writing formed an integral part of a network which also encompassed political memorials, legislation, historical documents, religious acts, and other material objects, all of which played a part in ascribing and ordering human subjectivity, or rather the cultural techniques of subject constitution. The medium of paper is significantly older than the printing press, which has often been associated with modernity. The use of paper is also broader than the constraints of the printed book. As Harold Innis pointed out, at a time when parchment was being employed in the decentralized governance of European monasteries, paper already supported a centralised bureaucracy in China (Innis 1986: 115). In loose sheets, forms, acts, documents, and letters – to mention but a few uses – paper later became the decisive material foundation of western modernity. Paper has been such an omnipresent product that it has been hard to recognise it as such, and throughout history one finds a great number of examples of how paper, both metaphorically and physically, has interacted with thought. Today, the dominance of the medium of paper seems to be challenged by digital communication and some even predict a paperless future. However that might be, we still measure written communication by the page, and on computer screens and tablets paper is remediated as the default format of information (Bolter and Grusin 1999). This relationship between old and new media is an expression of how media always exist as practice, rather than in abstract terms or as fixed entities, and of how the material medium of paper affects thought. The history of paper is long and widespread, and in recent years a significant scholarly interest in this ever-present medium has arisen, perhaps as a consequence of its apparently Introduction 15 imminent disappearance as a default medium of writing (Müller 2012; Kafka 2012; Krajewski 2011; Gitelman 2014; Vismann 2000). The use of the medium of paper around 1600 – for the Spanish Empire 1570-1630 are the pivotal years – marks the beginning of an epoch that is now said to be approaching its end with the advent of digital media. Dreams of a paperless society, where information is no longer stored in cellulose but in virtual clouds, have appeared over the last few decades.

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