"A thoroughgoing materialism needn't deny that the object has been
made by someone but must nevertheless treat it as if it had been made
by no one." Walter Benn Michaels

Resistance is the one thing that a physical book has to offer, along with all the blemishes, scars, creases and general accidentality that material inertia brings in its wake. To be sure, the resistance that physicality holds up via the book is a quixotic one. At times it seems like a deeply held conservatism and then at times just as equally radical. (Michaels' book The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History throws a dish on that fornicating interlocked couple of dogs and points out that both must of necessity lead to the field of force). Nevertheless. It has been my observation of late that a physical book locks out some distractions and locks down attention to it's attenuated page (growing more so the older I get). For one who likes reading on a tablet, it feels like being put into lock down and forced to move at a slower pace. (I must say that I never liked those speed reading programs---would never do for those like me who like to read certain sentences over and over again, linger over a word set or the framing of an idea, or just pausing for a wool-gathering couple of minutes when I seem to be just enveloped in a sort of processing fog. There is a stasis involved in long form reading, an affect that has been completely retooled for the hypertext bad infinity of the net where the main aspect is speed and movement, never lingering, or only lingering long enough to marshal resources for the next responding post.)

Of course there is the possibility of endless regress here, winding ever backward until we come to chisel carving our symbols and signs on rocks. (But then Michaels' point seems to be that is precisely where a 'thoroughgoing materialism' winds up, as marks which move farther and farther from any sort of transportable/reproducible meaning via a singular interpretation; or rather, more precisely, that meaning moves off of a subject and into the surrounding and supporting objects/environment in a widening gyre of circles and decompositions. As was often said in the Sixties drug trips, set and setting make all the difference between a good trip and a bad one...except that here it is up for grabs what even is going on, trip or something else. In these regions even the terminology used to describe the event is under suspicion...or at least up for grabs. For sure, materiality is no assurance of certainty.) But then again, under an electronic regime WHAT exactly is 'materiality'?? I risk at this point covering the same ground as did poststructuralist thought...which we indeed never left but in fact are just now fully coming into its tattered presence, with all the whole-ness which that entails.
Things never looked so bright.

Don't worry, I'm getting to the actual 'book stuff' soon....what is there to be in a hurry about?