From Documents to Information:

A Historical Perspective

 

David M. Levy

The Information School

University of Washington

Suite 370, Mary Gates Hall

Seattle, WA 98195

Tel. 206-616-2545

dmlevy@u.washington.edu

 

 

1. Introduction

 

For a century at least, concepts like document, text, work, and information have figured prominently in our attempt to make sense of written forms. Various disciplines, including library and information science, textual scholarship, and literary criticism, have invoked some or all these notions in their attempt to create a theoretical foundation for what they do. While there has been some general agreement about how these terms are to be employed (if one takes a rather broad view), there are also substantial differences in detail across schools of thought and even among individual scholars. Yet all these approaches seem to agree in one respect that is rarely noted: They offer static accounts; that is, they treat concepts such as document and text as entities that have existed for all time. A historical account by contrast would look at how these concepts have developed over time, or perhaps, how our understanding of them has developed over time.

 

Ever since I first read Ivan Illich’s little book, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Illich 1993), I have been eager to explore his historical account of the shift in literacy practices in the twelfth century. Of particular interest to me was his story about the emergence of text as an abstract object. My intuition has been that an exploration of this development might provide new, and fruitful, ways of making sense of notions like document, text, and information. And so I have decided to use this first meeting of the Document Academy to begin this exploration. In these very preliminary remarks, my aim is simply to lay out what Illich is saying and how I think what he’s saying could be useful. My hope is that the presentation of these ideas at the conference and the discussion that ensues will allow me to push these ideas further along.

 

I will begin by summarizing Illich’s basic argument. Following this, I will say something about the meanings that have conventionally been associated with the notion of text. Then I will focus on Illich’s claim about the history of text, specifically that the modern notion of text as an abstract object that floats above the page emerged in the twelfth century. And I will conclude with some thoughts about why an awareness of this historical shift might be of use to us.

 

2. In the Vineyard of the Text

 

Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was a complex figure, a social critic, Catholic priest, university administrator, and scholar without portfolio. He was also a controversial figure. In an obituary, the Guardian newspaper (London) described him as “one of the world’s great thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast terrains” (Todd and Cecla 2002). But the Guardian also noted that during the last twenty years of his life, he “became an officially forgotten, troublesome figure (like Noam Chomsky today in mainstream America).” In another obiturary written around the same time, the New York Times noted that its former critic, Anatole Broyard, had said that when winnowing books from his own library, he would “especially discard Mr. Illich’s works.” (Martin 2002) Though speaking engagements had declined, the Times further observed, Illich had been invited to a conference by Jerry Brown (currently mayor of Oakland), “who was called Governor Moonbeam when he was governor of California.”

 

Ivan Illich wrote on a range of topics, including education, technology, medicine, work, and literacy. On the last of these topics, he wrote two books, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind and In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. In the latter of these books, his central concern is with a particular mode of reading and relating to literary works, a mode which he and George Steiner (Steiner 1988) called “bookishness.” Bookishness is now coming to an end, Illich suggests, and with this ending it may be possible to formulate different approaches to the text, some of which draw strength from pre-bookish, monastic ways of reading. The heart of the book is the attempt to describe a monastic mode of reading (called lectio divina or sacred reading); to describe a shift that began in the twelfth century as lectio divina gave way to bookish reading (lectio scholastica or scholastic reading); and to describe some of the key characteristics of bookish or scholastic activity. Illich bases his analysis around the writings of the monk Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141), who wrote his Didascalicon, a manual on how to read, just at the point in Western history at which the shift from monastic to scholastic reading was taking place.

 

Lectio divina was quite different from our modern mode of reading. In the twelfth century, most reading was still done aloud. In communal settings, such as at meals, one monk would read to his colleagues; but even when reading alone, a monk would vocalize audibly, listening to the sound of his own voice. The text was not unlike a musical score, providing the notes that were to be sounded. “No wonder,” says Illich, “that pre-university monasteries are described to us in various sources as the dwelling places of mumblers and munchers.” (54)

 

Reading in this manner was a vigorous physical activity that engaged the whole body. Monks who were ill or infirm might not be able to muster the energy needed to read. Reading was an embodied activity whereby the words of the text were ingested and given voice: “The reader’s ears pay attention, and strain to catch what the reader’s mouth gives forth. In this manner the sequence of letters translates directly into body movements and patterns [of] nerve impulses. The lines are a sound track picked up by the mouth and voiced by the reader for his own ear. By reading, the page is literally embodied, incorporated.” (54) In a very real sense, the text was brought to life in the reader’s body.

 

If the reading practices of this era were different than our own, so too were their goals. The monastic reader was in search of wisdom and enlightenment. Reading was considered a remedial activity, meant to remedy humanity’s fallen state by “the restoring of our nature’s integrity, or the relieving of those weaknesses to which our present life lies subject.” (11, note 10) That one could also read for knowledge – e.g. to learn facts about the world or to acquire practical skills – was certainly understood. But in the context of monastic life wisdom, not knowledge, was the prize to be sought.

 

This mode of reading will certainly seem strange to the modern reader. How much difference does it make, really, to read aloud rather than silently? In what sense is lectio divina more embodied than our silent reading (which is surely an embodied practice too)? Does reading for wisdom rather than knowledge have any meaning other than as a metaphor? If we have little basis for understanding these practices, Illich would say, it is exactly because we have been raised to read in a markedly different way: scholastically.

 

While monastic reading was closely connected with prayer, scholastic reading aimed at study, and at the very acquisition of knowledge that Hugh of St. Victor had warned against, at least as a goal in itself. Whereas Hugh insisted on a patient and leisurely attention to the text, a meditative approach, the scholastic master wanted to give his pupils “all the help he can to locate with ease and speed what they want to read in the book.” (101) In the middle of the twelfth century, what Illich calls a “new will to order” emerged which is reflected in the development of secondary finding aids and a new design of the page better suited to access: “. . . an avalanche of previously unthought-of devices appeared: indices, library inventories, and concordances . . . The new page layout, chapter division, distinctions, the consistent numbering of chapter and verse, the new table of contents for the book as a whole, the summaries at the beginning of the chapter referring  to its subtitles, the introductions in which the author explains how he will build his argument, are so many expressions of a new will to order.” (104)

 

Others certainly have written about lectio divina as well as about the rise of scholasticism and the university. Illich offers two novel contributions or claims. First, while others have written about the rise of modern bookishness, they have general assumed, or claimed, that it arose in conjunction with, or in the aftermath of, the invention of the printing press. Illich argues instead that bookishness arose several centuries earlier, through the efforts of the twelfth-century scholastics. Second, Illich argues that our current notion of text (text as object) emerged during this period, a subject to which I will return in section 4 below.

 

The question of course arises about the truth of Illich’s claims. I am not a historian and am in no position to judge their accuracy. But I have collected a number of reviews of Illich’s book (Hagen 1994; Saenger 1995; Weele 2002), including several from medieval historians, and they are by-and-large quite favorable. Writing in Library Quarterly, for example, Paul Saenger takes issue with details of Illich’s history of reading, noting that his “chronology [is] seriously foreshortened.” But he observes that Illich’s “competence as a medieval scholar is well demonstrated,” and he concludes that “Illich’s volume, well written and learned, constitutes the best general introduction to the writing of Hugh of Saint Victor” and “belongs in every good college or public library.”

 

3. Document, Text, Work

 

What do we today mean by text? In Theories of the Text (Greetham 1999), D. C. Greetham begins by observing that the word “text” derives from the Latin texere, which means “to weave, join together, plait, braid” and therefore “to construct, fabricate, build, or compose.” “Text,” he goes on to say, “is thus both literal and concrete on the one hand – the physical woven text – and figurative and conceptual on the other: a work of art and both the technical and imaginative procedures whereby this work is brought forth.” (26) Text understood in this way covers a range of phenomena, from the most concrete and material aspects of expression to the most abstract and ideal aspects of content and meaning.

 

While the etymology of “text” may permit such a broad reading, many practitioners and theoreticians feel the need to limit the scope of text by introducing two further notions: document and work. In this division of responsibilities, a document is a physical artifact bearing meaning- or information-bearing symbols; a work is the essential meaning or idea that is being communicated; and a text is that which mediates between document and work: a sequence of words which, as the expression of a work, can be realized or embodied in one or more documents. These notions thus typically form an abstraction hierarchy: from the fully concrete document to the abstract text to the even more abstract work.

 

Patrick Wilson, in the first chapter of Two Kinds of Power (Wilson 1968), offers a clear account of these distinctions (although what I call a document he calls an exemplar). Suppose someone writes a poem, a letter, or a report. “When he has finished, that is, when he has decided to call the piece of work complete, the result is a sequence of words and auxiliary symbols, generally but not always written or typed on a page. What he has done can be described in many ways, of which the most important ones for us are these: he has composed or invented a work, a poem or letter or report; he has ordered certain words into a certain sequence and so produced a text; he has produced marks or inscriptions on some material that constitute an exemplar of the text.” (6) A text, he goes on to say, is “a sequence of words and auxiliary symbols, is an abstract entity, like the words of which it is composed . . .” (7) A work is then a family of texts.

 

There are many variants on this theme. Thomas Tanselle (Tanselle 1989), for example, a textual scholar and theorist, also distinguishes between the physical artifact or document and the work. “[A] piece of paper with a text of a poem written on it does not constitute a work of literature.” (27) But he further distinguishes between the text of a document and the text of a work. (The text of a document is the text that is present in a particular physical artifact. The text of a work is that which “can only be reconstituted through the application of critical judgment to each element of every surviving text [that is, to the text of every surviving document].” (27))

 

This is not the place to review the many variants on this theme. But I think it is safe to say that in the vast majority of accounts, text is considered to be an abstract object of some sort. As I noted earlier, however, in all the sources I know of, this notion of text is presented as an ahistorical fait accomplis: it just is. Ivan Illich is unique in offering a historical perspective on text: a story about when and how the notion of text came to be.

 

4. The text lifts off the page

 

Not only did the nature of reading begin to shift dramatically in the twelfth century, Illich asserts, so did the reader’s conception of that which he was reading. For the monastic reader, the material he read (a book, let us say) was a concrete unity. Its physical materials, its letterforms and illustrations, its sound and sense comprised a single unanalyzed unit, the score by which the vocalized act of reading was performed. There was as yet no distinction made between an abstract text and its concrete manifestation on the page. This distinction emerged as the result of a complex set of interactions between page, mind, and culture I briefly noted above. Illich uses a number of evocative phrases to describe this transformation:

 

 

Text in effect becomes a semi-autonomous substance. Text so understood is on the one hand an abstract object which Illich imagines “floating above the page” (118). But it is still tethered, in a curious way, to the materiality of the book without which it would be inaccessible to the reader. Illich’s name for this seemingly contradictory substance, “visible but intangible” (115) is “the bookish text.”

 

“The text could now be seen as something distinct from the book. It was an object that could be visualized even with closed eyes. . . . [S]trings of letters – words or lines – would henceforth generate an abstract architectural phantom on the emptiness represented by the page. The page lost the quality of the soil in which words are rooted. The new text was a figment on the face of the book that lifted off into autonomous existence. This new bookish text did have material existence, but it was not the existence of ordinary things: it was literally neither here nor there. Only its shadow appeared on the page of this or that concrete book.” (119)

 

5. Why does it matter?

 

Here then is a story about how the modern conception of text came to be through a process of abstraction. It is a story about the gradual decomposition of a relatively unified substance (the document) to isolate and identify – some might even say, to invent – a more abstract ingredient (the text). What interests me in particular about this account is the perspective it provides on the process of abstraction that continues today. For we are living through a time when great priority is given to information, which at least in the popular mind, is taken to be a kind of abstract and neutral substance consisting of particles or atoms of meaning, a “‘content’ divorced from any specific physical realization,” as Agre (Agre 1995) puts it. Much as text as abstract object was identified and distilled in the twelfth century, we have identified and distilled an abstract unit we call information. And much as this new notion of text came to have priority over the messy and transient forms of actual documents, information as abstract substance today seems to have assumed priority over both text and document.

 

In telling his story, Ivan Illich wants us to realize that other modes of reading have existed in the past, that new modes are now developing, and most importantly for him, that it might be possible to recover certain pre-scholastic approaches to books. The decline of the book and of scholastic forms of reading, he hopes, may actually clear a space for other modes of approaching the text. “With George Steiner I dream that outside the educational system which has assumed entirely different functions there might be something like houses of reading, not unlike the Jewish shul, the Islamic medersa, or the monastery, where the few who discover their passion for a life centered on reading would find the necessary guidance, silence, and complicity of disciplined companionship needed for the long initiation into one or the other of several ‘spiritualities’ or styles of celebrating the book.” (3)

 

While I am sympathetic to these concerns, my interest in this paper lies elsewhere. However much we may prioritize text over document and information over text, I am convinced that the materiality of our written forms matters – and that “materiality matters” (to borrow Duguid’s (Duguid 1996) phrase) more deeply than we yet know how to say. Clarifying the historical process by which we continue to isolate meaning from its grounding in matter might help us to see not just what we have gained in this process but also what we have lost, and might point the way to the recovery of documents in their full materiality.

 

If text as idea and as abstract object has a history, then so too does information. This history has yet to be told, as far as I can tell, although hints and conjectures are scattered in various places. In Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age (Schement and Curtis 1995), Schement and Curtis characterize our age, the supposed “information age,” as an age in which the idea of information has taken center stage:

 

“In this book, we propose that the idea of information forms the conceptual foundation for the information society. By that we mean a perspective in which information is conceived of as thing-like. As a result, messages are thought to contain more or less ‘information.’ Marketplaces exist for the buying and selling of ‘information.’ Devices are developed for the storage and retrieval of information. Laws are passed to prevent theft of information. Devices exist for the purpose of moving information geographically. Moreover, and equally important, the thingness of information allows individuals to see diverse experiences, such as a name, a poem, a table of numbers, a novel and a picture, as possessing a common essential feature termed ‘information.’ As people endow ‘information’ with the characteristics of a thing (or think of it as embodying material characteristics) they facilitate its manipulation in the world of things, e.g., in the marketplace. This is not to say that the idea of information is the only way to think about the products of our brains, nor the most desirable. Nevertheless, the idea of information is understood as concrete by most Americans and Europeans. And its observable presence serves as an identifying badge of the information society.” (2)

 

Through historical processes, then, text has come to float above the page, and information has come to fill our heads, our devices, and our documents. Such notions, however, are at best partial expressions of a deeper, more integrated reality. As far as I can tell, our feet still do touch the earth and our written forms are still grounded in their earthy physicality.

 

References

 

Agre, Philip E. 1995. Institutional Circuitry: Thinking about the Forms and Uses of Information. Information Technology and Libraries 14 (4):225-230.

Duguid, Paul. 1996. Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book. In The Future of the Book, edited by G. Nunberg. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Greetham, D. C. 1999. Theories of the Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hagen, Karl. 1994. Review of Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text. Comitatus 25:113-117.

Illich, Ivan. 1993. In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Martin, Douglas. 2002. Ivan Illich. The New York Times, December 4, 2002.

Saenger, Paul. 1995. Review of In the Vineyard of the Text. Library Quarterly 65 (2):244-246.

Schement, Jorges Reina, and Terry Curtis. 1995. Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age: The Production and Distribution of Information in the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Steiner, George. 1988. The End of Bookishness? Times Literary Supplement, July 8-14, 1988, 754.

Tanselle, G. Thomas. 1989. A Rationale of Textual Criticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Todd, Andrew, and Franco La Cecla. 2002. Ivan Illich. The Guardian, December 9, 2002.

Weele, Michael Vander. 2002. What is reading for? Christianity and Literature 42 (1):57-84.

Wilson, Patrick. 1968. Two Kinds of Power: An Essay on Bibliographical Control. Berkeley: University of California Press.