Burn a book – Kill a poem – Plunder Goethe: A biblioclast’s look into the history of media imaginary

"Save a tree, burn a book", chant the Book Protestors in the satirical video game Postal 2 (Running with Scissors, 2003). In the course of the player's story, this anti-book, anti-literacy group inevitably achieves its goal by setting fire to a library. True to the corrosive content of the rest of the game, this episode represents an extreme form of vandalism against book culture and its most prestigious institutions. However, under less exacerbated appearances, figures of burning, destruction and looting of books and libraries do appear in natively digital works.
Using the tools of visual semiotics (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2003), as well as the self-reflexive analysis of video game design (Gualeni, 2016), our paper proposes to follow an antichronological development over the course of three tables illustrating aspects of this intermedia biblioclastia that are at the same time, as we argue, states of the cultural history of the relationship between books and digital media. As a theoretical background, we will use Rajewsky's theories of intermedia representation and the notion of the media imaginary (e.g. Huhtamo, 1997). Thus, Postal 2 represents a post-digital imaginary of book culture, where the book has indeed lost its status as the dominant culture, but not to the benefit of digital culture, as had been predicted. It's a rejection of culture in the broadest sense in favor of stupidity and consumerism that has killed it, while video games are under comparable attack (as shown by the petition the Postal Dude is trying to get everyone he comes across to sign) but still are surviving.
In 1997, Johannes Auer published Kill the Poem, a work of digital literature on CD-ROM, in which a nonsense poem is shot word for word with a pistol. This technically simple device deploys a discourse on the relationship between literature and digital media in an era when the competition between these two forms was perceived by some as a struggle to the death. The interactive work can only exist through the destruction of alphabetic text, but loses its meaning as soon as this destruction is complete. Kill the Poem therefore seems to imply that textuality and interaction, codex and code, can only exist by constantly replaying an opposition that is as total as it is futile.
Thirty years earlier, in 1967, Manfred Krause and Götz Schaudt published the collection Poesie aus dem Elektronenrechner, a series of stochastic poems (based on random processes and rules of combination) imitating the style and vocabulary of canonical German poets, notably Goethe and Schiller. The book's escorting discourse situates digital processes in a relation of illegitimacy to the inspiration and aesthetics of texts from book culture. The point is to take up their codes and modalities, to show that the computer can do the same as the masters of literature.
By way of a conclusion, we will return to the modes of distancing (satire, paradox, playfulness) practiced by these works on their own discourse, to qualify our point and open up a synchronic reading that could complete our synchronic purpose.