Pettitt: Well, of course, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody wasn’t written by everybody. That’s a challenging thought.
Sauerberg: We are under considerable pressure to produce a book about Gutenberg’s Parenthesis.
Pettitt: So how do we report on the end of the book, in a book?
DS: So before the parenthesis, authorship was not really necessary?
Pettitt: No, and it was mostly anonymous. And sometimes, if there was a name, there’s often no information about the name. There are those who say that the first known author, Homer, isn’t the name of an author, it’s the name of a process because in very Ancient Greek “homer” meant “the joiner of pieces.” It specified a function, rather than an identity.
DS: And you were even talking about Shakespeare and the question of his authorship.
Pettitt: That’s right on the edge. That’s why I find being a Shakespeare scholar has also become very interesting.
DS: Shakespeare, the iconic author.
Pettitt: Well, he is now. The bracket goes right through his career. I put that bracket at about 1600, and Shakespeare is a very good example of someone who recycled material.
Sauerberg: It’s a Gutenberg-parenthesis symptom to hunt for the real Shakespeare.
Pettitt: He didn’t care. He didn’t care. Half of his works appeared without his name on them.
DS: They were published in quartos [big sheets folded into quarters]?
Pettitt: Quartos. Their equivalent of our paperbacks. They were published as paperbacks, and let’s say, half of them didn’t have his name on them. Shakespeare did not invent any of his plots. Shakespeare rewrote dramatized existing narratives, and in many cases, wrote new versions of existing plays. There’s an awful lot in Shakespeare, which is not Shakespeare. And he also used standardized techniques. He used verbal formulas and traditional dramatic structures, standard units—a bit like Lego bricks fitted together.
DS: Okay, not to keep us going all day, but there’s a couple things I wanted to work with and one of them is the limits of the idea of restoration and return. This idea of poets, storytellers and people who deliver news verbally—all that resonates as being restored today. But there seems to be a real fundamental difference between that kind of cultural production and the digital age, and that is this idea of a record. Sometimes I feel like the Internet is the ultimate container.
Pettitt: Well how long is it since you tried to link to a place, and it said, “no longer exists?” What is the average lifespan of an Internet site? I think I read it’s two years.
Sauerberg: You’re forced to change platforms every 10 years.
DS: Do you really have faith—in a serious way—that something you upload today will not be available later to come back to haunt you? Now we’re talking about authority. Now we’re talking about a thing in which all of your musings, and your poems, and your songs are now open to scrutiny, and I want to say permanently, and I think you should concede there’s a problem here, right?
Pettitt: In my experience and my thinking, the Internet, digital technology are as ephemeral as speech in the sense that I cannot easily now access documents I wrote in 2003. I will ask for special help to do it. And a lot will survive. I’m sure anything wicked I’ve written will turn up somewhere, but an awful lot of other things will disappear.
DS: But you see the issue about someone in Medieval times telling a story that was outside the bounds of authoritative sanction, afterward it was gone. Now, for journalists, this is not a small deal. But also as just people living in this new environment, the fluidity is, to me, within a giant container.
"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