The Proust Effect: on book-marks as an aesthetic medium

The present essay aims to show how all kinds of marks-in-books (media inside medium) trigger a sense of identity but displace it into a feeling of repetition: the same becomes ‘other.’ Marginalia and ephemera are usually considered memory and spatial dispositifs, but in creating this swinging between identity and repetition, they can be regarded as aesthetic media. The archaeological approach, alongside theoretical framing, is done by revising the problem of how identity and repetition are present in annotating as a thinking process in reading. We enquire if there is any possibility of hierarchizing all correlates without falling into any extreme position, from materialism to idealism, from nominalism to radical ontology. This approach will fall on what we call the Proust effect: there will be no bookmarks without books, but the same book is entirely different when marked with different bookmark apparatus affecting in this way the thinking process itself while reading. Such a simple and forgotten medium can singularize and create complex worlds, transforming common grounds into different intentions, expectations, and assumptions. A bookmark not only draws the place one is reading. We show that they are more complex than that: they are forms of evoking the melancholy one can experience when they evoke memories of the self that trigger the flowing of identities and repetitions. Proust’s Madeleine is a rhetorical metaphor we use to refer to bookmarks as aesthetic media effects. This approach is radical in two primary senses: a) no previous attempts were explicitly made till now to understand the function of this innocuous, or apparently innocuous media, and b) it shows that unthematized media, or techniques of communication, when deconstructed, can reveal significant importance in the determination of what is communicated while communicating with them.