Editing (Journals?) in the Late Age of Print Byron Hawk
This too is the journal editor's goal and it is becoming more and more difficult and vital in the context of online production. Electronic textuality brings up the problem of complexity—acknowledging all the variants of an apparatus—"a matrix that includes a technology, institutional practices, and individual identity formation" (Ulmer 246). Part of this inevitable expansion is in the direction of the visual. As the section of the collection focused on the visual makes clear, it is becoming increasingly impossible to think about the textual as somehow divorced from the visual. For Johanna Drucker, for example, "From the level of code to that of program languages and then document structures and interfaces, the configured elements have a graphical aspect that contributes to the structured production of linguistic meaning" (175). From such a perspective, editing in the age of electronic textuality requires the realization that the editor or as much as the author contributes greatly to the production of meaning in the complexities of text production. In this complex mode of production, "writers [and editors] become language environment designers" (Bernstein 180). In electronic journals, editors are more often than not performing the role of information designers. Unless the authors build their own hypertexts (which is increasing as more academics learn the "trade," but is still well below 50 percent of submissions), editors are charged with the task of putting texts into hypertext forms/structures which include all manner of visual elements (from page design to image selection). And often times when authors do submit hypertexts, editors must then evaluate the use of hypermedia as well as the textual content and integrate the submitted hypertext into the journal's structure. As Ulmer's postscript to the volume makes clear, online editors are operating in another paradigm shift. The notions of literate technology that derive from the book—and upon which textual studies and academic editing have been based—are moving farther away from the dominant mode of textuality in our culture. In the midst of the cultural shift away from the book as the primary mode of subjectification—the creation of the concept of individuality—the academy and its practices that are based on the book are no longer a dominant institution. The "linguistic turn" to theory in the 70s that presupposed textuality as the paradigm for analyzing culture is now confronted by new media as the emerging exigence for a paradigm shift away from the textual. With new media as the contemporary technology for recording cultural thought and experience (as opposed to writing/the book) comes a crisis for textual scholarship—the crisis of irrelevancy—and a crisis for academic editing—the crisis of authority. If the academy hopes to maintain even a peripheral role in our culture (beyond supplying workers for corporate America), then the movement to new media seems to be a necessity. Moulthrop, in his contribution to the collection, concurs that the book as a medium for dealing with the current state of textuality (as a tool for recording speech) is limited. New media allow for the "recording of all types of cultural performances that can be examined from the lens of textuality, but also operate in excess of that lens. In "The Muse Learns to Tape," Tim Hunt argues that the intervention of new theories of textuality that opened the concept to the visual and the cultural—or even the musical—combined with the technological ability to record such textual performances requires a new "textual rhetoric" (193). Such a rhetoric needs to take into account the complex, improvisational nature of writing as performance in an era that allows for recording multiple forms of textuality. Therefore, genetic criticism (aka literary or textual criticism) must continue to be open to all forms of textuality (film, music, hypermedia) not just canonical print works. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | Next Node | 8 | TOC | Single Page
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