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.

Cutting and pasting words, cutting and pasting pixels, cutting and pasting genes—ours is a culture of cutting and pasting, of grafting, of breeding, transplanting, recombining.

Joseph Grigely

While for some in cultural theory or rhetoric and composition this collection may offer little that is new, it does provide an important frame for textual studies—the term the editors apply to the "cross-pollination of postmodernism and textual scholarship" (5). As Fraistat and Loizeaux see it, "Until recently, the gap between textual scholarship and postmodern theory and criticism was nowhere wider than in their divergent concepts of text and textuality" (5). The exigence for closing this gap between a field that focuses on editing and archiving texts from a philological perspective and a field that focuses on re-writing and re-distributing texts has been the emergence of electronic textuality. The recognition that textuality exists beyond the printed book prompted the reconfiguration of the field in terms of postmodernism and poststructuralism, which have been heralded as pre-figuring electronic textuality. The new field of textual studies expands textual scholarship's purview beyond editing and archiving to issues of production, distribution, reproduction, consumption, reception, and sociology of texts. At root, the narrowing of this gap has moved textual scholarship into the realm of rhetoric—both the linguistic and material elements of a text are seen and understood within the context of its production, transmission, and reception.

Such a rhetorical turn opens the way for a turn to visual rhetoric as well. As Fraistat and Loizeaux note, Jerome McGann's distinction between bibliographic codes—elements such as page layout, typography, color, cover designs, and illustrations—and linguistic codes—the main texts, prefaces, dedications, endnotes, indexes, and appendixes—clearly opens textual scholarship to the visual and the way it communicates in concert with the textual (6). As George Landow makes clear, the world of hypertext and hypermedia makes the combination of the textual and the visual inevitable and something textual scholarship can no longer ignore. So much of Hypertext and Hypertext 2.0 focuses on the refiguration of the book, especially the primary texts and their surrounding scholarship. Many of his examples of hypertexts are of primary literary texts that have been expanded into hypertexts through links to other supporting texts, other primary texts, other literary and scientific texts, student criticism, expert criticism and marginalia, as well as important visual illustrations, which opens the text to multiple arrangements and designs that are open to ongoing growth and expansion.

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.

The collection seems to be centered on the Daniel Ferrer's notion of "genetic criticism." In his essay "Production, Invention, and Reproduction: Genetic vs. Textual Criticism," he develops the new editorial practice he calls "genetic criticism" in opposition to a traditional notion of textual scholarship. For textual critics, "the editor's job is precisely to disentangle and to assess the social and authorial decisions that concurred or clashed in the historical production of the text" (48-49). However, the editors are generally concerned with the later stages of the writing/drafting process and only go deeper into the production of the text if they suspect the production of their authorial edition is corrupted in some way. The goal for textual critics is to eradicate the contamination and purify the text. Genetic critics, on the other hand, are "concerned with the entire range of documents as evidence of the multiple decisions that were taken along the way, not because they throw light on the proper tenure of the text and help in making new editorial decisions, but because the object of genetic criticism is inseparable from the decision-making process itself" (49). The distinction is one of product vs. process. Ferrer wants to open literary critics to a more detailed notion of textual production and open textual critics to a wider notion of the social context of production. While textual critics focus on traces that produce a line to the final product, genetic critics focus on the relations among those traces, the final product, and the social and psychological elements that inform and develop out of those traces.

Again, hypermedia provides the testing ground. Ferrer sees hypertext as a good medium to represent this kind of movement/process that can never be fully articulated. The goal is not produce an authorial edition but to map the historicality of a text which includes the various decisions made in the production of editions. Such a criticism creates a "new textual body" beyond the book. This new textuality is "bound to be mutilated almost beyond recognition when it is forced in the Procrustean bed of a book" which "involves a linearization of something that is nonlinear . . . introduces an artificial hierarchy between elements that are only retrospectively hierarchized, and . . . causes not only a loss of the energy that nobody who enters into contact with drafts can ignore, but the sheer loss of information" (55). Hypermedia can offer a better solution, according Ferrer, because it is open to continual updating and offers nonlinear modes or presentation. It can better handle the complex interrelationships the genetic critic is after since, "It offers an unlimited number of paths through the documents; it allows instant juxtaposition of facsimiles, transcriptions, and commentaries . . . ; and it welcomes dialogic readings, with the unlimited possibilities of reordering, additions of new documents, and changes of readings . . ." (56). This ability to create a network of relations among texts and readings allows Ferrer to see genetic criticism as being more "material" because it takes into account more of the historical and social forces operating in the production of a text or edition.

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 is 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.

In her response to the section, "Shoptalk—Working Conditions and Marginal Gains," Rachel Blau DuPlessis agrees that "textuality is rich with the situational, accidental, contingent, and relational" (86), but worries that genetic criticism still carries with it its own problematics. She concurs: "An editor (whatever the ideology of his or her production) is not making an iconic or static thing when an edition is created, but entering into and engaging in a process of transmission that is (in principle) ceaseless. . . . Transmission, like translation, involves acts of intervention. . . . Every choice is motivated and belongs in certain ways to its own time, technology and regimes" (87). Her analogy is the performance of a musical score. The sheet music (text) may remain a static entity, but its deployment in new regimes of reason and unreason enact and embody that text in new contexts that create new assemblages, new performances. DuPlessis speculates, "Perhaps the new technology leads us to a biography of works, rather than to the biography of an author" (90). For me, this biography of works is extending in electronic journals to the biography of forms of textuality and their development. Editing an online journal is fundamentally different than editing a print journal precisely because it deploys texts in a different kind of environment and puts those texts into vastly different assemblages. (One example of which is this multi-journal issue).

But since Reimagining Textuality focuses more specifically on edited editions, DuPlessis' cautionary notes should be heralded. She notes three key issues/problems (92):

1. This kind of genetic criticism—the attempt to acknowledge all the variants of the context in which a text is produced—will only be produced for a certain audience and will therefore be centered on certain (kinds of) texts. Canonical works will generally warrant this kind of attention and analysis over lesser known/followed works. (However, media texts such as films may become popular enough that they may be opened up to such scholarship.)
2. What authors/texts can benefit from this kind of genetic criticism? What happens to authors who don't produce as many drafts or revisions, or whose contexts of production are difficult to access? (Not to mention what happens when people write on word processors and don't save drafts—like most of my students. Should this kind of criticism make its way to contemporary authors, new issues of technology's role in the production of the text will surely arise.)
3. Genetic criticism desires "diplomatic" or democratic readings/texts that show all perspectives/possibilities, but economic/material/pragmatic conditions make this task difficult. Not all critics/places have the re/sources for this extensive kind of criticism. (Hypertext will in some way alleviate this problem, but it too is becoming more complex as programs and coding gets farther away from the average writer, user, and editor.)

For DuPlessis, the editor's primary goal is to produce a text that will be read, and all of these potential problems can get in the way of that fundamental goal.

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.

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)

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.

From this vantage point, the role of the online journal is a crucial step for the development of scholarship in the new realm of textuality. Since the electronic book is (at this point in time at least) merely a replication of book technology, the first front of remediation—the shift from one medium to another via a transitional period of replicating the old medium in the new—appears to be the online journal. While it more often than not replicates the print article, electronic journals are among the first places in academia that are experimenting with newer forms of textuality. Without doubt the academy is too entrenched in (print) literacy as its foundation to dispense with it altogether. But, electronic journals provide a space for literate practices to engage other textual practices. So, even though Reimagining Textuality does not address electronic journals directly, its discussion of textual studies in terms of electronic textualities does provide a frame for thinking about the future of electronic journal publication. Editors of online journals are constantly negotiating print notions of textuality and newer forms of re/production. The fact that the book remains as the touchstone of tenure and promotion opens a space for the "article" to become a genre for experimentation, which in the long run could be the hinge for a larger transformation of textual practices.

While I hated to slight the visual and cultural elements of this collection in my review—there are some great articles by Drucker, Hunt, Schwarz, Moulthrop, and Ulmer that deserve more detailed attention than I gave them here—I was most interested in what the volume says about editing bodies, about the material bodies that edit and the textual bodies that are edited, about the social bodies that influence editions and about the additions we make or the deletions that ensue. Editing is a process of cut and paste, copy and repeat, rewrite and recontextualize. There is no perfect or ideal text, and certainly, no perfect or ideal hypertext given the current state of the tools we have at our disposal. Whether the grafter is editing a scholarly edition or an electronic journal, the new digital tools allow combinations and permutations in ever-increasing numbers. Any editorial foray into a text only creates more such possibilities. And the ever-increasing production of new digital tools provides the conditions of possibility for further interventions. In such an editorial context, editors should respect the perspectives of authors just as authors have to respect the varied perspectives of reviewers and editors that prompt their interventions. For some reason, this recognition seems to be made more often in the world of electronic journals than print publications. Perhaps it is the medium and its tools that force us to recognize the innumerable possible arrangements for a text.

Table of Contents: Introduction: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat Prologue: Compu[e]ting Editorial Fu[ea]tures, Jerome J. McGann Textuality and the Reproduction of Texts The Philosophical Discourse of [Textuality?], David Greetham Production, Invention, and Reproduction: Genetic vs. Textual Criticism, Daniel Ferrer Editing Bodies, Joseph Grigley Response: Shoptalk—Working Conditions and Marginal Gains, Rachel Blau DuPlessis Textuality and the Visual Graphicality: Multimedia Fables for "Textual" Critics, Morris Eaves Taking Textual Time, Mary Ann Caws Intimations of Immateriality: Graphical Forms, Textual Sense, and the Electronic Environment, Johanna Drucker Response: Every Which Way but Loose, Charles Bernstein Textuality and Culture The Muse Learns to Tape, Tim Hunt From Text to Work: Postcolonial Textuality, Henry Schwarz Testing the Wires, Stuart Moulthrop Response: Text Culture Grammatology, Gregory Ulmer

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