Editing (Journals?) in the Late Age of Print

Byron Hawk

Enculturation, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 2002

Rev. of Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergmann, and Neil Fraistat, eds. Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2002.

Consequently, editors and archivists have a whole host of new issues to take into consideration when conducting their scholarship:

1. The book must be retrospectively understood as a technology in and of itself.
   
2. Textuality must be seen both linearly and non-linearly in both print and electronic forms.
   
3. The primary text can retain is center or be decentered through ever-growing marginalia and linkage.
   
4. Indexes must be conceptualized in terms of searchability, accessibility, interactivity, and storage capacity (memory).
   
5. Texts exist in a new relation between hierarchy and complexity (the web often reinforces the former while attempting to deal with the latter).
   
6. In addition to visual and design elements, textuality and writing extends to the code and programming that goes behind the text, thus becoming a part of the text (which, as Fraistat and Loizeaux note, creates the possibility for an aesthetics "within the writing of the mediating code itself" (8).
   
7. All of this cutting and pasting, grafting, transplanting, and recombining creates increasingly blurred lines among authors, editors, programmers, producers, consumers, users, and commentators/critics, not to mention the blurred lines of juridical, institutional, national, and economic interests.
   

Asking who the author is and who owns the copyright of such an expanded text brings up the question of materiality. Paradoxically, just as the rhetorical reality of textual scholarship is pushing the field to recognize the material nature of the enterprise, it is at the same time questioning the location and nature of that materiality. For Fraistat and Loizeaux, all of this talk about textuality ultimately leads beyond the author to culture—the recognition that culture is "the ground on which we and our texts inhabit the textual condition" (8). However, if culture, or at least cultural practices, provides the material grounds for the new textual studies, then this simply redirects the question to the scope of language's ability to capture, express, or represent that culture. Which term, then, is primary? Does text encompass, embody, and transmit culture? Or, does culture operate in excess of textuality? If the cultural is now bound up with the digital as well as the textual, just where do we locate the material? Much of the volume (two-thirds of it) grapples with issues surrounding the visual and the cultural and the applicability of textual analyses to those aspects of the new textual studies. Since most of the arguments regarding the nature of visual and cultural studies should be familiar to this journal's audience, I'd like to focus the rest of the review on the changing nature of editing in the wake of electronic textuality—the subject of this special multi-journal issue. The articles in this collection provide a variety of important perspectives in this regard, since electronic textuality forces us to investigate the material basis for the production of edited texts.

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