Książka w świecie utopii

Abstract

The heterogeneous and multilayer structure of the book makes it an artifact (a literary piece of work that makes itself) difficult to define. Its basic cultural functions remain unchanged but in social conceptions and some of the reactions it evokes in its readers it can be related to cultural and historical evidence from the distant past. The book traces early totemism and cannibalism, and the remains of mask-and-tattoo cultures can be recognized. In its external, material layer, the book is inhabited by recognizable symptoms and unrecognizable symbols, whereas its internal layer, which consists of the text and the added editorial form, is like an alloy of both intellectual and counter-intellectual ideas linked with hidden and overt anthropological myths. The symbols appearing in the book have their cultural sources in either sacred or secular space and, according to the author, are derived directly from Hebrew, ancient Greek, Hellenic, Christian and cabalistic sources. In common space, the symbols of the book are a communication tool of secular power and as such serve pragmatic goals of individuals, of the society and of the institutional power of the country, in the political as well as technological and civilizational contexts. The external layer of the book, depending on the technological level, is subject to descriptions in the categories of finiteness, whereas its external layer is open to descriptions and interpretations in the categories of infiniteness. The realizations of the world consistent with human needs of continuity, persistence, order, logic, understanding and love, though present in both layers, are more evident in the internal one. Due to them, the book serves the purpose of simplifying cultural adaptation. The internal layer, commonly associated with the text is described in the perspective of logos myths, i.e. the myths of the word and mind. Social ethoses, emerging in result of arguments on the truth of logos, serve the consolidation of these myths. The author stresses the role of accidental contents which are present in every text and guarantee that the culture has a creative character and is not transformed into a utopia. In the case of almost every other book, a reverse situation also occurs, as if through a book man tried to charm the world to make it friendlier. Thus the human will and the subjection of the reality to a process of creating a myth are manifested, in extreme cases leading to the creation of a book utopia. Mutual overlapping of accidental and non-accidental, as well as intellectual and non-intellectual phenomena leads to the activation of the „book-play" mechanism, which enables the explanation of many of the readers' behaviors. In the second part of the dissertation, having made the assumption that utopias grow from social myths, the author analyses the motives of books and libraries appearing in literary utopias from the 5th century B.C until the end of the 20th century. Each complicated research problem requires the adjustment of the adopted methodology. In this case, for the sake of his research, the author has worked out an original way of verifying the cultural sense of the book based on structural elements taken directly from Thomas Moore’s metautopia and Plato’s trilogy of utopian dialogues. Within the group of problems governing the dominant paradigm, related with the utopias of the book dominating in the society (Kritias), he showed the continuity of ideas from ancient and Biblical realizations through Liber Mundi of Rosicrucians to contemporary realizations of virtual libraries in the epoch of the Internet. On the other hand, Plato’s dialogue Fajdros served as the illustration of the presence of the technical paradigm in the world of books. The author used it to arrange the realizations on writings and book matters, present in the utopian literature, in the cultural perspective between the extremes of technophilia and technophobia. The review led to the separation of the „utopias of the return” to the epoch of androphagi (consumed books), oral (phonographic) books, and „glass papyruses” forecasting the appearance of computer books. Cultural criteria used for the evaluation of the printed book encourage the reflection on the foreseeable effects of a medial utopia, leading directly to de-liberisation, i.e. the death of the printed books. The author tries to find out whether, due to the utopian dialectic, deeply rooted in the human history, a new informative order will emerge or the chaos will win - something that anti-utopian writers have long tried to warn us against. The third of the paradigms, embedded in the context of Plato’s State, arranges the problems of the book and libraries in relation to dominant utopian institutions. The book encourages individualism and for this reason the “planned social order” utopias make it the object of censorship. The victory of the utopian institution leads to the transformation of the book system into the utopian system. The author used the examples of church and state censorships and recollected anti-utopian postulates of John Milton. The history of censorship in the 20th century proves that it is embedded in the history of social utopianism. Tragic fates of people persecuted in totalitarian systems were accompanied by equally tragic fates of books which were burned, forged or written for propaganda purposes. Collectivism and totalitarianism are not the only threats to books. The author leads his considerations on the threats to books in the world of utopia to the problem of threats in the world of eudemonistic utopia which, while luring the man with wealth and hedonistic freedom, causes other addictions, equally dangerous to the past ones. In this context the author reflects on the hypertext culture and the threats it poses for the printed book. The book perceived in the anthropological perspective provokes questions on values in the situation of social and civilizational threats. The final chapter of the dissertation is devoted to anti-utopian guards of the personal ethos of „book-people”.