Editing (Journals?) in the Late Age of Print Byron Hawk
A similar rethinking needs to occur in our conceptions of the editor's role. I think Hunt hits on a key point in this regard at the end of his essay. He is discussing the "blurring of composition and performance" in an anecdote from Eddie Kramer, who helped Jimi Hendrix produce his album Electric Ladyland. Kramer says of the experience mixing the album for eighteen hours straight, we mixed the entire thing—the entire side of the record—in one go with no interruptions, so it was a complete piece. It was like a performance, and Jimi and I mixed it together, where he would grab his vocals and some of his guitar effects and I would do the drums and his other guitar effects and generally hold on to the whole thing so it didn't fall apart. And we'd be flying around the board like lost flies. It was the creation of a piece of music in addition to what had already been recorded. (qtd. 207)For those of you not familiar with recording on analogue equipment, this is a brilliant description of the process and it highlights what appears to me as the key point for editing in new media—the editors and the authors work together to create a piece of scholarship. Editing is a collaborative performance—bodies in assemblages with technologies to produces textualities. This, for me, is materiality. Grigley's point about authority—about who has the authority to edit texts/bodies—becomes a key issue from this perceptive on the material basis of text production. Such a conception of materiality is almost impossible to fully represent. The dream of a complete, authoritative edition seems remote if not quaint, something akin to Ulmer's recognition of the impossibility of "coverage" in an English program (242) in the era of smorgasbord expansion in the discipline (244). The broadening of textuality to culture and to new media makes it impossible to be a specialist in any field of English Studies. Adding new media to even the narrowest of fields complicates the possibility of being a specialist. How can we send a text to an "authority" to review if being an authority is becoming so problematic? Who has the right to remake or unmake a text? And for online journals one will have to become an authority not simply on content but on hypertext forms as well. If a reviewer or editor can't get past the hypertext form, how will s/he fairly evaluate the content? Once argument is transformed by postmodern textuality, can we still evaluate it based on a modern notion of textuality? Perhaps too many questions without clear answers. But in the face of such dispersal, what choice does the editor have but to become a "player" in the band, one element among many in the production of a text. For Grigley, "Textual critics should not expect from this discourse a directive on how to edit texts; rather, they might glean from this experience insight on how they might find value in texts they had once discredited" (82). Rather than function as an authority, editors have to remain open to assemblages with other discourses and technologies in order to deal with the expanding forms of textuality. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Next Node | TOC | Single Page
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