excerpt from Introduction

 

In Smallest Mimes I seek to locate a devil with whom we are all well acquainted, if not by name, by effect. He is the devil of small error, glitch, snafu, gossip, and legion inexplicable malfunctions. As we know or should know, “the devil is in the details,” and it is in the smallest of details that this demon resides and causes mayhem, and that is where I hunt him. He plagues all media, looking for structural weakness and design flaw, and, taking advantage of unintended, unforeseen problems, infects and magnifies each with its own inconsistency. His name is Titivillus, he has been around a long time, and he consorts with “tyrauntes” and “turmentoures”: "I am a poure dyvel and my name ys Tytyvyllus,” the grinning demon said when he appeared in the Middle Ages in John Lydgate’s The Myroure of Oure Lady. Soon, he was reported everywhere. In the medieval morality play, Mankind, he announces to his audience,

 

Ego sum dominancium dominus, and my name ys Titivillus.
Ye that have goode hors, to yow I sey caveatis!
Here ys an abyll felyschyppe to tryse hem out at yowr gatys.

I am the lord of lords, and my name is Titivillus.

You who have a good horse, I say to you, “Beware!”

Here is an able fellowship to steal them at your gates.

 

Overworked medieval scribes, as careful as they were to copy from an , found error creeping into their work—skipping words (), and innumerable other slips of the quill. They wisely attributed such errors to the mischievous interventions of the lord of misrule, Titivillus.

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In the 13th century, John of Wales was the first to note the demonic source of error, observing that Titivillus was required to fill his sack with scribal errors 1000 times every day and deliver them to hell. “Quacque die lille / vicibus sarcinat ille,” John of Wales laments.

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Titivillus, the patron of scribes, was and is apparently as overworked as those he oversees. Through time and in ensuing media innovation, he has enlarged his domain in order to bedevil typographers, book binders, filmmakers, radio broadcasters, television broadcasters, web designers—any who labor in any media. Our devil is as modern as he is medieval.

But it is not only the carelessness of practitioners of any medium that brings on error, not only the tedium of endless repetition, not only the inattention that follows drowsiness, not only daydreaming. More fundamentally, each medium itself has an inherent deficiency built into its original design that defaces the communication it is invented to convey, small initially-unnoticed material flaws in the structure of the medium that over time show up in error. Over time, this small error grows. What at first was an annoyance, an inconvenience, begins to cause confusions that are not small. The “details” that Titivillus infects with error are small, but their impact on meaning can be great. We, those who want to understand the meaning being carried to us in any medium, are in need of protection from this devil’s mischief. Fortunately, the smallest mimes of the gods of snow, who also first appeared in the Middle Ages, quickly saw the problem. They saw that not all error was scribal, that sometimes it was the result of the medium itself. Medieval scribes invented a sentence to illustrate the problem many had in reading their script because certain letters were indistinguishable because they looked the same. In English, the Latin sentence reads: “The snow gods’ smallest mimes do not want in any way in their lives that the great duty of the defenses of wine be diminished” (mimi numinum niuium minimi munium nimium uini muniminum imminui uiui minimum uolunt). It is difficult to read the line because the Gothic script in which the original was handwritten, which I approximate here in print, utilized a basic unit, the single stroke or minim to compose the graphemes < m, n, i, u >. In Gothic script, side by side, these letters—written without spaces between words and, in the case of Gothic < i > that had not yet acquired its distinctive, supra-stroke dot—look like a series of single strokes in a row. The sentence was created by scribes wanting to draw attention to an inherent problem in the medium’s mode of production: the minim, a straight, vertical stroke, was the easiest mark to make with a quill pen writing on parchment. The quill-point angle and direction of the stroke (ducts) for making curved or broken stroke letters

< c, s > and bowed letters < b, p, r >, while used in medieval scripts, were more complicated, involving more than one stroke.   

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The snow gods’ smallest mimes, intoxicated or sober, are not jejune fantasies or avatars invoked to protect medieval scribes against Titivillus’ relentless presence in human communication. They draw our attention to a truth that Richard III found in defeat and death on Bosworth Field, but that we find in media studies:

 

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

 

The work of the smallest mimes reminds us that mimesis or representation is the fundamental activity of all media and, more importantly, that the written “word” is a copy of the spoken word, is language itself.  Confusion introduced at the beginning of the process of mediation in any medium because of flaws in the very medium that copies, confusion that results in the defacement of the communication in that medium and its transfer to another medium, is where smallest mimes have led us. We need not confine our efforts to palaeography, however, to find the deviltry of surrogate “minims” at work in print, film, radio, television, cyberspace, or any other medium. The devil not only induces scribal error in the mediated world; the mediated world is his creation and error its original sin.

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It may be argued that my argument is reductionist, that by reducing understanding of media change in meaning to small procedures and tools I do not grasp the larger, spiritual, semantic, and cultural meanings, that I reduce meaning to the ductī of pen strokes, picture frames, vinyl record grooves, filmstrip frames, and other minutiae of media technologies-that I focus on function and structure at the expense of meaning. But these smallest, troublesome dysfunctional media parts and practices are not abstractions to which an argument is reduced. They are essential material pieces of the medium under investigation; they are part and parcel of the medium itself; and, in them we are able to account for the distorted successes and distorted failures of a medium. In The Sciences of Historical Study, Stephen R. Reime states the issue at hand:

 

Where does historical evidence come from? We can posit that historical evidence comes primarily from documents and artefacts. Of course, the distinction between these two is not easy to maintain for very long: documents are a kind of artefact and the physical properties of a book can be studied in much the same way as the physical properties of a burial urn can be; and, on the other hand, non-documentary artefacts must be “read” and interpreted with skills similar to those applied to documents. Still, there is some usefulness in recognizing that there are linguistic and non-linguistic sources of historical evidence.

 

Attention to these smallest of details that impact the mean conveyed in their media does not and should not mean that larger issues are not equally important to the overall description of media we are making. The smallest of problems that Titivillus placed in the structure of each medium implies and results in overarching ideological change, epistemological breaks and paradigm shifts, and ontological reassessments. The smallest problems demand that we consider the nature of reading and writing, speaking and listening, and viewing and viewed.

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A first surprising challenge of attention to these greater issues reaches deep into our most fundamental medium, writing, and we are confronted with value of literacy itself and the prejudice of the literate, as though are the center of the universe of wisdom and the illiterate helpless orbit around them in unfortunate darkness. Notice that the il-literate are defined as not-literate, as though they are a negation of the literacy that followed it because not cannot descriptively come before is. When in fact orality is pre-literate. Orality did not define itself or think of itself as not literate. The more accurate term is post-oral, which places literacy in orbit around language itself, that is, the spoken word. In short, we return to issues concerning the efficacy of writing first brought up by Socrates in Phaedrus, saying that it diminishes memory, replacing remembering with reminding and reality with appearance. In the most recent historical repetition of this observation, digital and Internet media, data dementia replaces wisdom. In the apocryphal Letter II, Socrates says,

 

Consider these facts and take care lest you sometimes come to repent of having now unwisely published your views. It is a very great safeguard to learn by heart instead of writing. It is impossible for what is written not to be disclosed. That is the reason why I have never written anything about these things, and why there is not and will not be any written work of Plato’s own. What are now called his are the work of a Socrates embellished and modernized. Farewell and believe. Read this letter now at once many times and burn it.

 

Can an illiterate be a philosopher—or, more to the Socratic point, can a literate be a philosopher? The Socratic Method, in the end, is a spoken conversation, not a text, and we may ask if this method can be transferred to written media. The structure of writing and print as a line requires that we understand the conditions of its appearance in the physical properties in the book. Reime’s material artefact [sic., British spelling] gives us a concrete to begin our investigation. Spatial lineation, the structural support beam of written communication, is overshadowed by the importance of the representation of language visually (“language” accurately used for the spoken word only, not the written word), whether lineated in alphabetic writing or non-lineated, as in pictograms.   

In Smallest Mines, media issues large and small, direct and indirect are considered.