This text intends to contribute to the transformation of the classical printed book to its alternative forms and shapes, praxeologies and customs. Besides digital variants, this also applies to those that specifically emphasize other forms of reception, those that shift the reading experience into the virtual sphere. At the same time, the book has an enormous capacity to persist in the economy of mediation. This applies both to the customs of its use and to its cultural status in general.
It is self-evident that this transfer of the book’s appearance does not take place without interruption. Of course, there are significant differences both in reading habits and in reading scenes. Reading modalities have also changed, diversified and differentiated. However, the appearance of the classical book and the traditional ways of dealing with it persist. It is necessary to situate this appearance of the book and thereby put its persistence in relation to the phenomenal formations, to the changed arrangements, infrastructures, and materialities.
The book remains valid as a semantically as well as phenomenally equally resilient center of organization, not least because it succeeds in regaining terrain by the use of technical possibilities and thus also by reaffirming its historically vouchsafed phantasmatics, for instance by using new sensualities. Procedures of virtualization and augmentation turn reading into an advanced reception possibility, adapted to the state of the art of the technical world of living and reading.
In the course of this shift, not only did the possibilities of reception change, but also the object of reading. Both aspects can be condensed into two core concepts, which also characterize the title: Multisensory and Uniqueness. Multisensory integrates other senses such as tactility and haptics in addition to seeing and hearing. Whereas the concept of uniqueness encompasses moments that promote a regionalization of literature. The corresponding narrative appears increasingly data-driven (data epics): It is based on a sensorial recording of life circumstances, and on the individual and personal set pieces which can be found in the respective environments. Not the major themes of world literature, but the respective life conditions with their everyday objects and behaviors become the driving force of narratives and reading moments. This finding is particularly striking in view of the possibility of typographic duplication and contradicts common expectations. The object of reading and thus of literary mediation is thus less a canon of literary works that is considered authoritative. Rather highly personalized narrative forms and narrative moments are tapped in the course of changed receptions. These emerge in different places and with different target groups as effects of these new possibilities. In this way, an almost poetological momentum is unleashed that not only works its way through predefined narrative patterns and a canon of works considered authoritative and translates them into other reading environments, but also creates them autopoetically.
Both aspects, the expansion of the senses and the radicalization of what there is to write and read, contribute in their own way to making the concept of mediation more flexible and to freeing it from the appearance of the social-distributive, that is, of the field of markets, editors, forms of distribution, and event routines. Literary mediation thereby becomes a process of mutual references between production and reception, but by no means a moral custodianship and transfer of a set of texts, however stably conceptualized, that are commonly understood as literature.
In the derivation of these changes, there is a peculiar overlap with historical ways of dealing with and stations of reading. It turns out that above all the possibilities of a multisensory addressing are themselves literarily prefigured – in a reading that Friedrich Kittler has reconstructed prototypically for the writing system of 1800. In the course of the New Reading, cultural technique and media technique, imagination and immersion, enter into a relationship of mutual modeling. Reading forms alliances, for example, with the technical possibilities of designated immersion scenarios, thus, under the conditions of virtuality. The discussion of altered sensualities is laid out, for instance when haptics for affective reading or reading under new highly technical reading environments are inquired about.
This paper demonstrates that the book survives these movements in many ways. It maintains its persistence through strategies of flexibilization and participation. But it also persists by changing the praxeologies associated with it, as the persistence of page-turning shows. It opens up to new forms of multisensory experience. In the course of this transformation, virtuality becomes nothing less than a mediating instance of certain notions of literariness. And even more: virtuality promotes storytelling in a variety of ways. It enables collaborations and organizes occasions; it opens up residues of the participatory and the co-speculative. Located in an environment that, under titles such as Research through Design, Speculative Design, or Design Fiction, wants to break away from functional monotonies and guaranteed affordances, the design of alternative futures thus becomes possible. The book appears in the mode of the tailor-made, the personal tailored, the issued unique. Uniqueness and multisensoriality thus constitute the center of a new reading.
