Editing (Journals?) in the Late Age of Print Byron Hawk
Perhaps genetic criticism, however, thinks it is doing postmodern rhetoric while it is actually using technology for greater control or accountability. David Greetham, in "The Philosophical Discourse of [Textuality?]," argues that postmodern textuality is not yet invisible (assumed)—certainly in the field of textual scholarship, but also in the academy as a whole—but that "modernist principles of coherence and control can be just as present in hypermedia textual production as in the print codex[,] . . . precisely because the controls and constraints are hidden" (41). The "unlimited possibilities" Ferrer sees in hypertext are actually just different kinds of limitations or constraints. Perhaps hypertext is able to provide a different kind of space that coheres more readily with the goals of genetic criticism, but these goals can fold back into modernist ones unless they are kept in check. Greetham, therefore, calls for a balance of postmodern approaches and modern approaches that recognizes the possibilities and the pitfalls and the interconnectedness of the two projects. For example, the very modernist desire for an invisible textuality is founded on the nature of the visible text recognized in postmodern discourses of textuality, and the postmodernist desire for greater complexity and contextual inclusion can be caught up in a desire for greater, more accurate truth or control. Rather than function as a binary opposition, textual studies and genetic criticism often work together and in the light of each other. Greetham notes that the balance he is after is there in the etymology of the term "text": from textes to textile—word and body (38). For Joseph Grigley, the genetic engineering of bodies is like genetic criticism of texts, which allows him to position textual criticism as a sub- field of body criticism. In "Editing Bodies," he recognizes that the search for an ideal text is like the search for an ideal body and worries about the fascist implications for textual scholarship. Grigley argues, "Ultimately, we do not just make bodies—we unmake them, remake them, and make them over. . . . As with texts in the hands of textual critics [or editors] this issue is one of competing authority, who owns identity?" (79). This issue of who has the authority to determine the final configuration of a text is no small one. Since "texts, as bodies, are extensions of the bodies that create them" (82), the authority to produce and edit them has to remain dispersed among a field of participants in a discourse. In Grigley's article, he recognizes that the characteristics of the postmodern body are the same as postmodern textuality—they are both assemblages, grafted together from various cut-and-pasted discourses. Editors in such a context have to relinquish a certain amount of control. Grigely writes, "There is a massive irony here in the compulsion to exercise control just at the moment when we feel we have lost control. As in the case of the so-called definitive edition, the desire here is that of authorship: to construct a text, to construct a body, and to sign our constructions, to label them, to assert a specific plan" (80). Editorial bodies (editorial boards) can no longer function as gatekeepers who approach a text from a prefigured plan or sense of what the text should be. They will need to start functioning as the center-point of an assemblage of texts and bodies that brings together various ideas, bodies, and texts in order to edit a single text as well as produce an edition, a volume, or an issue. In this model, the authors and editors function on a more even plane. Grigley characterizes it in terms of the old punk aesthetic: "The letters 'D.Y.I.' once meant 'Do it yourself.' The letters 'E.Y.I.' now mean 'Edit it yourself.'" (80). From the perspective of genetic criticism, editors, reviewers, and authors all function as editors in a cut-and-paste economy. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next Node | 6 | 7 | 8 | TOC | Single Page
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