Rock, Paper, Scissors: On Media Revolution and the Death Penalty

Ceci tuera cela.

—Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris

The words cited above are what I will be calling Victor Hugo’s formula, or law, of media revolution. They are pronounced by the archdeacon Claude Frollo in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, a novel initially published in 1831 and set in the Paris of 1482, that is, twenty-seven years after the printing of the forty-two-line Gutenberg Bible and just twelve years after books were first produced in Paris using the new technology. The term ceci (this) is the new medium of the printed book; cela (that) refers to Notre-Dame Cathedral. For Hugo, the printing press arrives in a city where another medium has held sway: not the manuscript book, as more recent narratives of the printing revolution would lead us to anticipate, but rather the stone of architecture. The city of Paris appears as “a chronicle in stone,” while Notre-Dame operates as a monumental text (“each stone . . . is a page”¹) in which, prior to mass literacy, human life gets externalized and recorded.² The stone “book” would thus be the ancestor of the printed book but also its double: “mankind has two books, two records, two testaments: masonry and printing, the stone Bible and the paper Bible.”³ Print and stone operate in Notre-Dame de Paris as historical rivals in a media revolution, the impact of which is, in Hugo’s reimagining, already being felt in 1482. This feeling presents itself as a presentiment of violence: the printed book is coming to “kill” Notre-Dame. This is what Frollo announces in Book Five:

The archdeacon silently contemplated the gigantic building for a while, then sighed as he stretched out his right hand towards the printed book lying open on his table and his left hand towards Notre-Dame, and looked sadly from the book to the church.

“Alas!” he said, “this will kill that” [ceci tuera cela]. . . .

“[T]he book will kill the building.”⁴

Media revolution in Frollo’s foretelling implies not only a succession of (technical, aesthetic, material) regimes but also an act of violence or even a calculated execution—albeit a strange kind of execution we have yet to understand, performed by one medium upon another. Indeed, the new medium would seem to possess the power—or perhaps even the sovereign right—to put the other to death.

Hugo’s formula in which new media give death to the old, ceci tuera cela, is all the more striking given that the novel Notre-Dame de Paris prominently features the death sentence and ends on the dramatic execution of a central character, La Esmeralda. What’s more, Victor Hugo was an outspoken advocate for the abolition of capital punishment and had just two years earlier published the overtly anti–death penalty novel Le dernier jour d’un condamné. This backdrop of capital punishment invites us to take seriously—and literally, as it were—Hugo’s verb tuer (to kill) and its death-sentencing simple future tense, tuera. In what follows, this is precisely what I will be doing: tracking the relationship between, on the one hand, the life and death of media—particularly this strange killing of stone by the printed book—and, on the other hand, the logic of the death penalty. What would it mean to read the history of the death penalty as a history of mediation and media change and vice versa? This will be my central question, beginning in Paris with a coincidental story of stones that resurface during the twilight of the death penalty in 1977; I then return to Victor Hugo and his killer printing press of 1482, passing by way of 1793 and pausing on Jacques Derrida’s recently published Death Penalty seminar. This risks being a story that turns in circles, since I will be arguing (with Hugo but also against him) that both media change and the death penalty are best understood as phenomena in which substitution is violently at work and always already taking place. Ultimately, I wish to argue...