Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational
N. Katherine Hayles
New York: Columbia University Press, 2021
231 pages
ISBN 978-0-23119-824-0

With the rise of the electronic book market at the end of the twentieth century, books began to attain intelligence. E-books now imperceptibly collect and retain a considerable amount of information about their users regarding geographical location and reading habits. Furthermore, e-reader devices are capable of collaborating with the human reader in so much as these can anticipate and respond to the desires of the reader in quite intricate ways. An average reader might not comprehend the cognitive capabilities of e-books and e-reading devices or grasp the workings of the codes and templates that underlie each page, which may ultimately lead to anxiety about the ways technology is altering our reading habits. To help readers get their way in this new labyrinth of reading, an informative and comprehensive book, Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational by N. Katherine Hayles, explores the conditions of the era that the author calls postprint, the time period during which computational media has profoundly transformed printing industry. Hayles sets the era of bound books from the fifteenth century to the mid–twentieth century and the beginning of the postprint era to around 2000. Since then, the processes of book production and consumption—including ways of creating, selling, and reading books—have been significantly altered by technology. Text and materiality are no longer automatically associated with one another since in the postprint world, the hard copy of a book is just one of the alternatives the reader might choose to purchase and consume. Now, instead of ownership, it is mere access to the texts—and the information within them—and a grasp of the code beneath the visible text.

Hayles—who has authored countless outstanding works within posthuman studies, including How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatic (1999) and My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005)—continues exploring the relations between human cognition and computational media by conducting interviews with five leading American university presses and analyzing multiple fictional texts. In this context, Hayles’ present book positions the era of postprint within a framework of cognitive transformations. In her previous books, the author has already highlighted how cognition—which she defines as “a process of interpreting information in contexts that connect it with meaning” (6)—is not just a human trait or capability, but it is also a characteristic of nonhumans and computational media. Consequently, this implication changes the hierarchical position of the human in connection with technology and other species. Hayles proposes the term cognitive assemblage to refer to instances of interconnection and collaboration between humans and computational media. (For example, a person is participating in cognitive assemblage when talking on the phone or turning off a light switch.)

Following an introduction to the terminology and framework used in the book—which consists of the interconnections between postprint and cognitive assemblage—Hayles begins her analysis with the conception of printers as cognitive machines by providing instances of cognitive assemblages throughout the history of printing. She provides informative illustrations of the machines, detailing how these devices have been assembled and marketed. Although humans design and operate these printing machines, cognitive technologies are now capable of running independently for a considerably longer extent of time than before. Hayles notes that the evolution of computational media has come to be entirely intertwined with human evolution, resulting in the condition that she terms cybersymbiosis. While exploring the innovative progress for both hardware and software, she points out the industry’s short-term goals of the corporate pursuit of profit and its ethical challenges.

The book’s next part shifts the perspective to editors, publishers, designers, and scholars, and on how they use the innovations of print technologies in practice. Hayles interviews staff members of university presses and aims to conceptualize how postprint scholarship functions. Financially, it is a difficult time for scholarly publication (especially monographs), resulting in the current climate which might not support innovative technological approaches. Five American academic publishers are interviewed for the book’s material: the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, the Columbia University Press, the Duke University Press, and the University of Minnesota Press. These presses each publish 90-250 books per year. With the analyses focusing on the field of humanities, it should be considered that, for the most part, the staff does not invent or control the technologies needed for publishing but merely relies on them. The University of Chicago Press, for example, now sells books on Amazon, so they cannot always check or control the books that are sold in the name of the press. In this postprint era, humans are less in control of the publishing process. Digital books have also profoundly changed how university presses operate. One of the interviewees from the Columbia University Press explained that they rely more on templates, using the same fonts or designs; as a result, costs can be reduced with the help of technology. Costs also decrease in terms of warehousing, since books do not have to be stored. Additionally, networking and collaborating with other scholars on projects are aided by computational media. Cognitive tasks are distributed between authors, readers, texts, and software programs, so agency becomes spread out and shared. Hayles emphasizes the role of computational technologies in scholars’ and university presses’ daily tasks and the work done by cognitive assemblage between humans and technological devices.

In the book’s last section, moving on from the case study of university presses’ transition to digital production, Hayles investigates the influence of postprint on a broader cultural imagination. As an example, The Silent History (2014) by Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, and Matthew Derby—a novel written and designed in an app format—and The Word Exchange (2014) by Alena Graedon, are analyzed from the point of view of cultural imagination here. The two works are connected by the common theme of exploring anxieties and hopes relating to technology and, more specifically, to the conditions of postprint. Although both are science fiction narratives, they have differing attitudes towards technology. While The Silent History sees the era of postprint as having both positive and negative aspects, The Word Exchange presents a much darker view. In the latter, human cognition is threatened by the innovations of postprint, and the narrative depicts how it becomes increasingly troubling for the characters to think about the ways in which their humanness is transformed by computational media—particularly regarding their reading and communication habits. Another example Hayles provides is Between Page and Screen (2012) by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, which is an augmented-reality book that can only be read on a computer screen. To give yet another example of such shifts in reading and communication, one needs to just think of the invisible code behind the textual display of an e-book’s page. Hayles provides several illustrative examples of such pages, showing the codes necessary for formatting them. Nevertheless, the concept of the digitally generated—or just digitally mediated—language opens deep-rooted fears about human cognition and cognition in general. As Hayles explains, human language is also changing under the influence of computational media. After such shifts in the postprint, “language cannot so easily return to its former status as a production of human cognition alone” (38). Language and literacy have thus both been affected and transformed deeply and permanently by the postprint era.

With Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Hayles envisions postprint book production as cognitive assemblage, and she justifies her argument based on archival research and interviews. Taking the argument a step further, she even suggests that in developed societies cognitive assemblages play an essential role in maintaining the current standard of living. Hayles’ book provides a unique framework for understanding print (and postprint) from a fresh perspective. Through the case studies, which rely on interviews with five university presses and the analyses of two fiction books, Hayles explores the meeting points of human and computational cognition. This well-designed visual aspect of the book—such as the illustrations of machines, the displays, and explanations of coding, which are usually hidden from the human reader—enhance the postprint reading experience, paradoxically through a print book. This volume contributes primarily to book studies relating to the history of technology or print, media studies, and, as Hayles concisely adds, to cognitive-cultural studies through its discussion of digital media. Despite common associations of bookishness with hard copies and bookshops, Hayles understands the postprint condition to be the “aesthetic of bookishness in the twenty-first century” (188). It is interesting how this book comes to its readers through the very same publishing process it scrutinizes, as it has doubtless been mediated through technology at every step of its process. Similarly, this review of Postprint has also gone through a comparable cycle, having been written, submitted, and edited with a strong connection to contemporary technology.

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