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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 performative space, which we understand as an "ecology of the book". Extending this practice beyond the book's margins, yet simultaneously embedding it within the material and technical affordances of the book’s medial articulations, we evoke a "new" ecology—one unfolding alongside the interaction-landscape and its actual and invented inhabitants, as well as the techniques of its production. Texts, drawings, figures, figurations, methods, and both human and non-human authors weave together 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. This approach manifests, on the one hand, through the transgression of traditional scientific methodologies and a shift in models—from thinking-of-the-other toward thinking-with-the-other, and on the other hand, through the agency of our eponymous characters, Fauna and Flora, who not only title our books but also act as conceptual operators—figures that navigate, perform, and activate the very spaces our texts explore. Applying Michel Serres' methodology of thinking by inventing personae, these characters move within 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.
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[1] We enter a book as 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 built 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 familiar sequence of numbered pages, and the startling unexpectedness of positions and positioning. Thus, the topological description of the book-room is one of "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? Yet the capacity for mathematical describability—geometrical or topological—is troubled by the presence of the book-body.
[4] In Times of Crises, Michel Serres defines ecology as an "inextricably difficult discipline." Not so much an ideological or political science, but rather a discipline that includes all life forms (and their sciences): "everything that is caused and causing, coded and coding." Such a gesture of inclusion is undoubtedly a risky and turbulent matter—its spatial articulation as risky and turbulent, as uneven and unpredictable. A spatiality fragmented into locations, positions, directions, layers—embedded in harmonious and friendly, as well as turbulent and uncomfortable patches, the margins of which do not fit together. In tracing these margins, we create a map that is as real as the "world" itself, reminiscent of Borges’s fictional account Of Exactitude in Science—a map as large as the territory it represents. Borges’s map envelops the land it is meant to measure like a skin. Map and landscape touch one another so tightly, so accurately, and so rigorously that the distance between them, in scale or meaning, evaporates.
[2] 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 becomes 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.
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.
[3] 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 Michel Serres's understanding of ecology. The field of ecocriticism measures the correspondence between "word-world" and "actual world," or, in the words of Laurence Buell, ecocriticism is about "the matching or non-matching of wordscape and worldscape that takes quite varied forms." Material Ecocriticism challenges this differentiation by considering the articulation of matter not only in a text but as a text. "Mattertext" is, therefore, the text-body embedded in world-matter.
[5] Our maps are more-than-texts. They recall the primordial textures of space that emerge through the practices 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 site of its textual production, our more-than-texts unfold as a space-skin. Is this space-skin the de-centred, 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.
