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I have been scouting around in the field of “book history,” and it is rich indeed. And of course the rest of the Internet: […] [L]iterary work by its very nature sets in motion many kinds of creative intentionalities. These orbit in the universe of the creative work—but not around some imaginary and absolute center. Rather, they turn through many different kinds of motion, at many structural scales, and in various formal relationships. The universe of poiesis no more has an absolute center than does the stellar universe we have revealed through our astronomy. What it has are many relative centers which are brought to our attention by our own acts of observation. The universe of literature is socially generated and does not exist in a steady state. Authors themselves do not have, as authors, singular identities; an author is a plural identity and more resembles what William James liked to call the human world at large, a multiverse.
Literary texts differ from informational texts by being polyvocal. Whereas “noise” is always a form of corruption for a channel of information, it can be exploited in literary texts for positive results. The thicker the description, so far as an artist is concerned, the better. (Minimalist styles of art thicken their media by processes of subtraction and absence.) A thickened text is a scene where metaphor and metonymy thrive (Coleridge’s “opposite or discordant qualities,” his “sameness with difference”). For [Hershel] Parker, the thickness comes from the artists’ imaginative resources, who can be counted on to put into their texts far more than they are even aware of. Parker’s “intention” includes, crucially, the vast resources of the unconscious and preconscious.
But thickness is also built through the textual presence and activities of many non-authorial agents. These agencies may be the artists’ contemporaries—these are the examples most often adduced—or they may not; furthermore, the agencies may hardly be imagined as “individuals” at all. The texts of Sappho, for example, gain much of their peculiar power from their fragmented condition […] [1]
[…] But what’s unique in the case of literature is that the text isn’t the finished work. A novel or short story isn’t a solid object. It’s just groundwork, and the reader’s imagination and reference points revive its content, extrapolate from its clues, and finish the work individually. In a way, when you’re writing a novel, for instance, you’re actually writing an unpredictable number of novels at once, and that number depends on how many copies end up being read. No other art form that I can think of involves that level of collaboration between artist and audience and disrupts the passiveness of being a work’s receiver with so much freedom and creativity. The high degree of interaction and codependence that the writer/reader axis makes possible is gorgeous and offers such a great opportunity to experiment with how text reacts when it comes in contact with the imagination. And writing allows you to play with the crapshoot decision of when a work is finished or, rather, when something is ready to be placed outside of your control and then finished by other people in largely unknowable ways. […] [2]
[…] But texts shape the response of readers, however active they may be. As Walter Ong has observed, the opening pages of The Canterbury Tales and A Farewell to Arms create a frame and cast the reader in a role, which he cannot avoid no matter what he thinks of pilgrimages and civil wars. In fact, typography as well as style and syntax determine the ways in which texts convey meanings. […] The history of reading will have to take account of the ways that texts constrain readers as well as the ways that readers take liberties with texts. The tension between those tendencies has existed wherever men confronted books, and it has produced some extraordinary results, as in Luther’s reading of the Psalms, Rousseau’s reading of Le Misanthrope, and Kierkegaard’s reading of the sacrifice of Isaac. […] [3]
[…] To this point I have been taking the word “text” to signify the linguistic text, the verbal outcome at every level (from the most elementary forms of single letters and punctuation marks up to the most complex rhetorical structures that comprise the particular linguistic event). And even if we agree, for practical purposes, to restrict the term “text” to this linguistic signification, we cannot fail to see that literary works typically secure their effects by other than purely linguistic means. Every literary work that descends to us operates through the deployment of a double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes, on one hand, and the bibliographical codes on the other.
We recognize the latter simply by looking at a medieval literary manuscript—or at any of William Blake’s equivalent illuminated texts produced in (the teeth of) the age of mechanical reproduction. Or at Emily Dickinson’s manuscript books of poetry, or her letters. In each of these cases the physique of the “document” has been forced to play an aesthetic function, has been made part of the “literary work.” That is to say, in these kinds of literary works the distinction between physical medium and conceptual message breaks down completely. […] [4]
1. Jerome McGann, “The Socialization of Texts,” The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), 42.
2. From an interview with author Dennis Cooper that is part of the HTMLGiant “What is Experimental Literature” series of posts. You can read the whole interview (which is great) here.
3. Roger Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), 21.
4. McGann, 43.
Fig. 06.11.01
A scriptorium. The imaginary space of this construction. [1]These past two weeks I’ve been finishing another volley of the NewLights broadsides, spending many hours a day cutting and peeling the negative space of text away from the text itself. The process creates its own tracks, is multiply inscriptive, multiply legible. And because of that activity, I have been thinking a lot about “the body writing,” and I have been about thinking the broadsides and the altered books in relation to scribal activity and manuscript books. No conclusions yet, of course. But somewhere I see the slow pulse of a poetics of inscription, of printing, of making. Not a poetics about, but of.[…] writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. […] [2]
Barthes uses the term “scriptor” to describe his “modern” author or writer. That particular term is very unstable, especially when examined in relationship to the activity of the scribe, typesetter, and/or printer. Is there a point where “authorship” ends, and “scripting” begins? Is it the point “where all identity is lost, starting with the identity of the body writing”?So we will start with this term “scriptor,” and begin to map out the space it occupies, or creates…scribe n. 1. historical a person who copied out documents. informal, often humorous a writer; especially a journalist. 2. Jewish History an ancient Jewish record-keeper or, later, a professional theologian and jurist. 3. (also scriber or scribe awl) a pointed instrument used for making marks to guide a saw or in signwriting. v. 1. chiefly poetic/literary write. 2. mark with a pointed instrument.
script n. 1. handwriting as distinct from print; written characters. writing using a particular alphabet: Russian script. 2. the written text of a play, film, or broadcast. 3. Brit. a candidate’s written answers in an examination. 4. Computing a program or sequence of instructions that is carried out by another program rather than by the computer processor. v. write a script for.
scriptorium n. chiefly historical a room set apart for writing, especially one in a monastery where manuscripts were copied. [3]
[…] the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered—something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets. […] For [the modern scriptor] […] the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins. […] [4]
Fig. 06.11.02
Marking/making the word & the book is a game with serious consequences. "The Cathedral of Fulda preserves an early theological manuscript whose wooden covers are reputedly scored with the marks of sword blows received when St. Boniface, a German evangelist in the eighth century, used the book as a shield to ward off a pagan attack. The book was none too effective in this respect, and Boniface was killed, but the book has been held as a treasured relic ever since." [5] The imaginary space of this construction.1. Image from: Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word, (Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1980), 4.2. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image — Music — Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 142.3. Definitions are from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Revised Tenth Edition, 2002.4. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image — Music — Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 145-6.5. Image and description from: David Pearson, Books As History: The importance of books beyond their texts, (London: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2008), 132-3.
The following quote is from: Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) 58-9. It offers a sociological/cultural definition of authority, which is perhaps useful for our examination of authorship:[…] Authority names a complex social process of dependency. A person possessed of authority differs from a tyrant, who deploys brute force to be obeyed. As Weber long ago observed, someone possessed of authority elicits voluntary obedience; his or her subjects believe in him. They may believe him to be harsh, cruel, unjust, but still, something more is present. People below come to rely on those above them. In charismatic forms of authority, those below believe that the authority figure will complete and enable what is incomplete and disabled in themselves; in bureaucratic forms of authority, they believe that institutions will take responsibility for them. […]
What’s interesting about this definition is that it points out the fact that people desire authority—it “elicits voluntary obedience.” We, as readers, expect and believe that we need the author(ity) to explain & guarantee the meaning/value of the work. Cutting away the author is to free the work from its primary signifier. Without this we are alone, tentative, fumbling. There is anxiety. There does not seem to be a goal.I do not ask authority or authorship from the mug that I’m drinking coffee out of. Its specific function frees me of that anxiety. Can “use value” replace the author(ity) in art?
The goal is no longer to be an “artist” or “author:”[…] The new mode of book production […] In the figure of the master printer, […] produced a “new man” who was adept in handling machines and marketing products even while editing texts, founding learned societies, promoting artists and authors, advancing new forms of data collection, and contributing to erudite disciplines. […] [1]
But the “master printer” should be dissolved into the press itself:[…] The new mode of book production […] In the figure of the small press, […] produced a “new productivity” that was adept in handling machines and marketing products even while editing texts, founding learned societies, promoting artists and authors, advancing new forms of data collection, and contributing to erudite disciplines. […]
The emphasis, obviously, remains on production, but what an expanded list of activities, all out there in the world.1. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 154. The image in this post was scanned from the cover of the book. The caption describing it reads: “A printer’s shop, detail of an engraving from Nova Reperta, a series of prints, designed by Vasari’s pupil, Stradanus, in the 1580s, engraved and published by the Antwerp firm of Galleus. […]”
When I was first thinking about and planning this series of posts, the idea was to base them on a close reading of two essays, the classics on the subject: “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes, and “What is an Author?” by Michel Foucault.B O R I N G!Actually, no, not boring, not at all. But if the intent here is to look critically at authorship now, then staying within just those two (authoritative) essays doesn’t make much sense. Refined approach: use the reading of the essays as a structuring principle, but build the “text” from in situ writing and other sources. Keep the authorial on its guard, and do not be beholden to just two powerful voices, no matter how insightful they are, no matter how much you may want to agree with them.& keep up the interchange of this series on authorship with the other series on The Hand-Mechanical and The Democratic Multiple. The switching between the three is the movement of this practice.& a new book this weekend, related & humane, and bringing other things back around. From Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 37-8:The modern era is often described as a skills economy, but what exactly is a skill? The generic answer is that skill is a trained practice. In this, skill contrasts to the coup de foudre, the sudden inspiration. The lure of inspiration lies in part in the conviction that raw talent can take the place of training. Musical prodigies are often cited to support this conviction—and wrongly so. An infant musical prodigy like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did indeed harbor the capacity to remember large swatches of notes, but from ages five to seven Mozart learned how to train his great innate musical memory when he improvised at the keyboard. He evolved methods for seeming to produce music spontaneously. The music he later wrote down again seems spontaneous because he wrote directly on the page with relatively few corrections, but Mozart’s letters show that he went over his scores again and again in his mind before setting them in ink.
We should be suspicious of claims for innate, untrained talent. “I could write a good novel if only I had the time” or “if only I could pull myself together” is usually a narcissist’s fantasy. Going over an action again and again, by contrast, enables self-criticism. Modern education fears repetitive learning as mind-numbing. Afraid of boring children, avid to present ever-different stimulation, the enlightened teacher may avoid routine—but thus deprives children of the experience of studying their own ingrained practice and modulating it from within.
Skill development depends on how repetition is organized. This is why in music, as in sports, the length of a practice session must be carefully judged: the number of times one repeats a piece can be no more than the individual’s attention span at a given stage. As skill expands, the capacity to sustain repetition increases. In music this is the so-called Isaac Stern rule, the great violinist declaring that the better your technique, the longer you can rehearse without becoming bored. There are “Eureka!” moments that turn the lock in a practice that has jammed, but they are embedded in routine.
The clip above is from Emile de Antonio's 1972 film Painters Painting. The film itself (highly recommended, by the way) is made up of interviews with artists, collectors, critics, and dealers. This clip shows part of the interview with Andy Warhol. Note how he's also holding a microphone, as if he's conducting the interview as well. Warhol's "film crew" can also be seen in the background/mirror.
The role of publisher/designer/bookmaker naturally puts one in a strange and strained relationship with the role of the author. One spends a great deal of time and energy making and distributing work that is not necessarily one’s own. That is not completely one’s own. That can be very much one’s own.Traditionally the designer and printer of books is supposed to hide their work, and let the author’s text be communicated as clearly, quickly, and cleanly as possible. Multiple voices of authorship are noise in the channel. Noise complicates things. Noise makes for an impure experience. Noise is the murmuring of the crowd, or the grinding of the machine, or both. Noise is confusion. Noise is public. Noise is the penetration of the world into the hermetic realm of art.Noise is figure/ground ambiguity. Noise is far worse than figure/ground ambiguity, it is work/frame ambiguity. One never leaves, the ringing in the ears persists. The experience of the work does not stay within the reader’s interaction with the work, does not remain separate from, or other. Noise cuts right through to the receiving subject in body, space, and time. Noise speaks to the individual as one individual among many.Silence is a myth.The body is a noisy machine, always present.
I wants to be:[...]
a standard level of quality [...]
a certain field of conceptual or theoretical coherence [...]
a stylistic uniformity [...]
a definite historical figure in which a series of events converge
[...]
I is not:[...]
a standard level of quality [...]
a certain field of conceptual or theoretical coherence [...]
a stylistic uniformity [...]
a definite historical figure in which a series of events converge
[...]
What I is is not that. The world?The quotes are from: Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 128.
A month or so ago I received an email from a poet/printer that I admire, and in that email he wrote:
[...] I want to say however how much I admire and value your enterprise - for me, the book has to stay alive, and while I appreciate the argument (I have other reasons for being forever grateful for some writings of Roland Barthes), the author has to stay alive also - for who benefits by the death of the author, of individuality, of specific agency - well, it's money, power, and monopolistic enterprise of every sort [...]
And I realized that he had a good point—the "death of the author" is a dangerous idea. I realized that in my, shall we say, postmodern zeal I had dismissed the author entirely, had not looked at the concept critically, and had not, very importantly, examined how that concept is playing out today in the cultural field. A regular reader of this blog (if such an angel exists) would know that the work of NewLights is deeply concerned with the problem(s) of making. In fact, it is that activity of making, that problem, the risk and danger of it, the absurdity of it, the absolute necessity of it, that drives the whole enterprise. So there is something worth recovering in the idea of authorship, at least of authorship in the sense of “one who makes things.” But there are aspects of authorship worth shedding as well—that are necessary to shed—namely its links to authority and the power that denies the very act of authorship.And of course where there is danger, there is something at stake, and that is where the interesting discussions are.Mr. Beckett, via Mr. Foucault, provides our title for this series. The full quote:What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking.
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