Sauerberg: I don’t think that Tom and I think in completely parallel ways here, but we have a return to a situation where you count on individualism and where authority is a problem. If you go back to a time before the parentheses started, you sometimes could match authority with God or with a metaphysical world picture that made sense. The problem is that, nowadays, after the parentheses, you would have to find a new sense of authority. The Wikipedia phenomenon is very characteristic of the situation because on the one hand, we have the destruction of all paper, all print encyclopedias. We have to use the online facilities, but the online facilities like Wikipedia are looking desperately for authority in order to become credible, so there is a war out there in cyberspace fighting for authority. But the point is that with the encyclopedia, within parentheses, the authority was in the encyclopedia, in the format of the book, in the book as a symbol. We no longer have that. You have to make up your own authority. Whenever you look up a word, you have to be very much aware of, “how far is this authoritative?” So you have to think in two planes at the same time, on two levels.
DS: So you’re saying that’s in contrast to before the parenthesis, when authority was clear?
Sauerberg: I think authority was always invoked before the parentheses. You lived with God in the back of your mind all the time. What happened within the parentheses was that you abandoned God. I mean you didn’t realize it until Nietzsche, but you abandoned the metaphysical theory behind everything. But now you have to have this double mindset. You’re always looking out, checking, at the same time, as you are experiencing things.
DS:I want to stay in the period before the parentheses and understand how did people think and communicate and how the way they communicated altered the way they thought?
Pettitt: I think we agree but we have our different emphases. After all, Lars Ole is interested in literature and philosophy and the higher reaches of culture and cogniniton. Specializing in folklore and popular culture, I’m more interested in what happened on the ground. Well, my phrase for it is that networking was replaced by the “containment” that we talked about. I’m right at the base of the cultural processes; I’m thinking about the actual physical means by which information was communicated, and it was done by connections. It was done by people who spoke to people. Any tale, any narrative that survived existed by virtue of someone performing it. Someone who knew it, remembered it, and they performed it again and again. Or they performed it, and someone else heard it and remembered it, and they performed it, and someone learned it from them—just connections. Connections between a series of performances from one person who knows the tale and then a series of people who passed the material onto each other.
That process of connection also involves instability because there’s no authoritative text. If you’re telling a story of King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, then the person who told it to you isn’t there when you’re telling it, and he didn’t compose it anyway, and there’s no fixed text. You will tell a story that works for the audience you are speaking to, and that story will change. So we’re talking about connections between performers, and through those connections, the material changes. The words are unstable and that is certainly going to have an effect on the way people think.
DS: So they were singing songs, reciting poems, playing the lute, and whatever else they were doing in the town square. But how did that affect the way they thought of themselves as people, of the society they lived in, of the world?
"I expect citizens would tend to rely on the most legitimate public officials for news, trusting especially what the White House sent their way."
So the folks at CJR would rely on President Bush's word? And Rush Limbaugh's listeners' Obama's?
People will listen to what they want to hear - those who already agree with them. The Balkinization of opinion will continue, and likely worsen. Legitimacy is irrelevant, and those caught making false statements - like Dan Rather - are held up as heroes.
There is literally not a single news source, right or left, that is trustworthy today. It's all about enforcing The Narrative. Perhaps we are all Homer after all?
#1 Posted by Jayat, CJR on Sat 8 Jun 2013 at 09:56 AM
This is nonsense on stilts. It's as if nothing happened before about 900 CE. The only reference to an earlier period is to Homer. In the ancient west alone, how about: public inscriptions of laws and edicts on stone, with punishments prescribed for anyone who moved or defaced them; private inscriptions, such as curses, on metal (ever heard the phrase 'aere perennius'?); the disputes about the authentic and correct texts of the dramatists, Homer, etc. amongst grammarians from the 3rd c. BCE, of those of the founders of the school amongst Epicureans from the 2nd c. BCE, and of those of Plato and Aristotle amongst Academics & Peripatetics from the 2nd c. CE; Galen's complaints in the 2nd c. CE that people were circulating early works of his without his permission, and works not his under his name; and the vast numbers of papyri that have survived, preserving everything from private letters to New Comedy (and Epicurus). We even have writing tablets from Vindolanda. The "orality" of ancient Greek culture and the transition to literacy has been a topos for decades. (This is off the top of my head, by the way. Nothing fancy.) On the other hand, early printed editions of books often present very different texts. The number of "ephemeral" political pamphlets produced in Britain from the 17th c. on is staggering. In short, these authors seem to be peddlng a piece of fiction; so it's probably appropriate that its title would assign it to the Ludlum Corpus.
#2 Posted by Cat, CJR on Sat 8 Jun 2013 at 02:04 PM