Intellect

Authors:  Jen Webb 
DOI: 10.1386/jwcp.2.1.27_1

Keywords
artist book, rhizome, object relations, fetish object, performative

Abstract
It does not take many steps for ‘book’ to transform from predicate to subject, or for ‘object’ to change from noun to verb. In this article I discuss the book as concept and as object, drawing on the history of the book, and contemporary discourse and practice, to suggest how books engage us as members of society and as individual practitioners. The article draws on Deleuze and Guattari's reconceptualization of the book as plateau, and as assemblages of strata, working rhizomatically rather than programmatically. It draws too on Foucault's reclamation of the book as experience and experiment rather than knowledge-object to suggest ways of encountering the self and the world in the act of writing. Perhaps not surprisingly, I reject the ‘death of the book’ scenario, and instead offer an expanded notion of the book as that which can lend itself to performative actualizations, to the magic of the fetish object, and to the work of thought itself: the book as cognitive event; the book as ideas machine. To exemplify these notions, I discuss some recent moves in Australia to explore handmade books that operate not only as art objects, but as research products too, and also suggest how digital books offer alternatives to the conventional performances of identity, for writers and readers.