Week Eleven: Post-Digital Textual Studies

In Marta L. Werner's analysis of the post-digital manuscript in "Reportless Places: Facing the Modern Manuscript " Benedetto Croce asserts that the draft "reveals only the illusion of genesis, the part of the creative process that has been inscribed on paper. It is a fallen document, a fragment of the intellectual, abstract, ideal genesis of the work that remains forever beyond understanding" (63). While the details of the actual textual thought process may indeed be transcribed upon the paper as a sort of "living document," it only illustrates the actualization of change that permeated the author's writing. The lack of the actual thought processing then becomes the issue at hand. The draft then, despite all hints suggestion otherwise, is nothing more than a less-than-ideal fair copy, a sort of pseudo-transcript that exists between the plane of genesis and finality that shoots painfully far from detailing the actual transition between the two states in a satisfying and, perhaps more importantly for the textual scholar, relevant manner. If writing, then, is “something that is happening [. . .] at the cross-roads of the mental and the physical," while the draft helps to reveal some of the underlying thought behind the fair copy's final edition, using it to analyze the medium itself becomes problematic even for the textual geneticist (64).

Before the existence of the World Wide Web, the "perfect draft" was best emphasized as manageable through the arts where the piece itself becomes seamless, where the draft itself becomes the fair copy (although there seems to be a stigma against the written word via manuscript for the very reasons described above). However, with the rise of internet culture, the perpetuation of blogs and vlogs seem to bring the textual scholar closer to finding an actual outlet for the transitory process that is desperately being searched for. While they remain in the limbo of genesis and finality, due to the nature of the living website through the life of the author, there seems to be a call back to the insistence of the first hand experience of the document vis-a-vis daily, weekly, monthly, etc. updates and posts, a more in-depth, albeit more authored, "reading of traces" and can in fact go beyond into the notion of "reading of reading" in and of itself.

But these posts are hardly representative of the draft that would satisfy the sensation of "re-living the event of writing." While they may help to demonstrate the power of an ever changing fair copy, unless the author is displaying their actual textual changes throughout their post, the very changes that make up the draft become lost. Vlogs in particular become problematic in that the very thought process behind their genesis is virtually impossible to trace in a readable manner beyond a sort of hashed together interview on the piece itself. While some vloggers may participate in releasing "deleted scenes" and "unedited footage," the nature of their videos remains in digital homeostasis. In other words, while the bits and pieces of the actual fair copy may be released in chunks, very rarely will you actually find a document that hasn't been edited in some way. At the very least, the transition from the camera and the real world experience changes when digitalized as a moving image and more so as it becomes edited and even beyond that when uploaded onto a video hosting website like Youtube or Vimeo.

What do you think about the change from physical to digital transcription and its effects on the idea of the draft? Do the new forms of production help to strengthen or dilate the textual genesis that arises out of the blog/vlog? What sort of "ghost phenomena" do these new forms offer?



(Note: I'm afraid that I'm still unable to attend class this week due to unforeseen circumstances. If there is anything you want to discuss on this week's readings, please post here or make a new blog post and I will do my best to respond to them in a timely fashion. Sorry again and happy discussion!)