A Language of Scratches and Stitches: The Graphic Novel between Hyperreading and Print

Abstract

In one of the memorable media historical anecdotes of the electronic Stone Age that was the 1970s, security officials learned about haptic reading the hard way when the classified documents hastily shredded before the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran were painstakingly reassembled by hand. The unshredding was not done by intelligence officers but by specially hired local carpet weavers. As the deputy director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University commented, "for a culture that's been tying 400 knots per inch for centuries, it wasn't that much of a challenge." 2 The different time scales of abstract mathematical possibility and human activity are important elements of the unexpected reconstruction, yet the story reveals more than a case of absurdly patient reading. It is also a demonstration of the curious fact that if you cannot read a document with your eyes like an intelligence analyst, you may still be able to read it with your hands like a carpet weaver-a shift that acknowledges reading as a genuinely multisensory experience. The New York Times article mentioning the Tehran unshredding incident (on the occasion of the more recent electronic reassembly of Stasi files) calls the weavers' method "crude," a label both nave and arrogant in equating predigital slow technologies with a lack of sophistication. 3 In fact, the role of touch in the embodied reading process can vary in subtle, often unconscious ways, although the significant cognitive consequences of this multisensory experience, which normally go unnoticed, may require cultural confrontations as bizarre as analysts versus weavers to appear.