2010 Theme:

Scribbling on the Ether:
The Changing Nature of Writing and Publication

From when rhapsods carried epics in their heads and sacred texts got scratched onto papyrus scrolls, to Gutenberg’s mid-fifteenth century moveable-type, to our own Internetted hearts and minds, “writer,” and “publish” have metamorphosed relative to technological change. Both concepts, so interrelated as to be mutually determining, have down to our own time centered on hierarchical authority; in pre-history, oral tradition carried the store of tribal/ethnic identity and as such was an ultimate authority, ultimate arbiter as to what would get written down, laboriously, and rendered a fetish as a sacred and/or defining text. By the time books could be produced by means of mechanical reproduction in printing presses, the notion of the book as a repository of not just received wisdom but of discrete information, and therefore of cumulative knowledge, became the cornerstone of culture.
 
The transformation from oral to print culture has been exhaustively chronicled; yet, as much as we have recovered of antique primary texts, those objects and the genius they convey are vestiges, still, of oral cultures, social organizations in which very few individuals were literate and even fewer had access to texts. It was not until books became ubiquitous and more-or-less universal education made most of them accessible to large percentages of populations did print culture emerge fully from oral culture, and the authority determining what indeed would manifest in print, in books, became a matter of editorial discretion in democratic societies, and of elaborate filters constituting censorship in totalitarian ones.  Among academicians in both democratic and authoritarian societies, a “referee” process of peer review constitutes editorial discretions; regarding more or less “serious” literature, literary agents in league with publishers and their editors are the gatekeepers in democratic free-market societies. Regarding all else, market imperatives, in the West, have been the authority determining what will pass into print.
 
One of the ironies of literary culture is that it is often most vibrant, most vital, in totalitarian societies. “Samizdat,” the underground literary distribution networks in Eastern and Central Europe, not only challenged the authority of censors but also rendered textuality something once again communal and interactive. Writers copied one another’s texts on typewriters using carbon paper, and distribution, hand to hand, always in clandestine fashion, was intimate and even a little heroic. Challenging the state’s exclusive authority to publish and distribute texts, the Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Russian, Yugoslav writer staked out the essence of cultural life. “Quality control” in samizdat was less important than the mere fact of distribution.

But in the age of the internet, the Chinese government’s mighty and largely failed attempts to control it notwithstanding, the line between “official” and “unofficial” texts begins to fade in even the most resourcefully totalitarian societies, and the traditional authority of the editor, whether journalistic or literary, has likewise faded.

Are we moving toward a “paperless” textuality? Are books, as such, becoming anachronisms? Will it mean the same thing to “publish,” to be a “writer,” when all or most texts will be virtual? May the process by which texts are brought to prominence, through wise and scrupulous editorial discretion, maintain its integrity in the virtual dimension? When anyone can “publish” at anytime, what is the value of publication?

Richard Katrovas, Director
Prague Summer Program