2018 - The Death of the Reader

Človek a spoločnosť, 2019

This text presents the concept of the romantic author in a broader context. Firstly, it points out its roots connected with antics (Bennett, 2005), then it describes its pre-concept, which is rooted during the rise of the typography (Ong, 2005), and finally it directly concentrates on the era where this concept is truly formed (Abrams, 1958). Based on these opening statements, the author of this text defines the concept of the romantic author in the sense of an individual sovereign creator in the context of western traditional authorship. Then the text points out its main goal to concentrate on the selected concepts, in order to demonstrate the contemporary overcoming of the author who is grounded in the western tradition. The author of this text uses an interdisciplinary approach in order to describe the topic, but primarily he prefers the approach of the media epistemology, based on which he classifies the subject of his interest in three key categories: firstly, he defines the concept of the romantic author in terms of its birth and its non-global character; secondly, he is oriented on the metaphor of the death of the author (Barthes, 1984), which Carpentier (2011) considers as a starting point for the weakening of the sovereign authorial position in order to present fantasies, which reflect this shift; and thirdly, he is concentrated on the term produsage (Bruns, 2008), where the author eventually (not just metaphorically) disappears, and points out the necessity of the produsage liberation from its techno-optimism. The article then presents two different approaches which reflect the actual overcoming of the romantic author in the sense of an individual creator in the context of the contemporary information society. The first one (Balve, 2014) refers to the birth of typography, which he describes in relation to the authorship in terms of speculative historical narration, and further he strives to keep this idea in the sense of genuine authorship, while he simultaneously points out its ideological construct. In contrast, the second approach (Sutherland-Smith, 2005) inclines to the overcoming of this idea, because it is no longer valid, and prefers establishing a so-called new order (Myers, 1998), which would simultaneously reflect this shift in the context of the World Wide Web. The author of this article prefers this second approach, because this very concept allows us to liberate the concept of traditional authorship from its obsolescence and to point out its very real overcoming. The text then comes to the second key point, constructed by the previously mentioned media epistemology, and clarifies the author/viewer convergence with the reference to Carpentier and his utopian and dystopian fantasies. Carpentier classifies them into three categories: firstly, into the modernist concept of the cultural professional, who symbolizes a nostalgic effort to keep the obsolete order; secondly, into a still modernist form of the author/viewer convergence, which is dystopian or utopian (produsage); and thirdly, into the postmodern, late-modern or fluid-modern form while he refers to the utopian participatory fantasy (Pateman, 1970) as the most preferred approach. The author of this text ultimately doesn't agree with Carpentier and prefers the concept of produsage as the only type of fantasy which captures the very real overcoming of the sovereign individual romantic author. The author then points out the necessity of liberating the produsage from its modernist utopian ideas and the need to accept the author/viewer convergence in full range (via produsage) and to put it into the context of contemporary

Digital Age in Semiotics and Communication, 2018

Before being the title of our new journal, Digital age in semiotics and communication was a short definition of the research program of the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies at the New Bulgarian University. Of course, today speaking of a “unified program” in the humanities is a utopian act, given the nature of our communities, the hyper-productivity of our colleagues, the orientation towards projects, a shortage of funding, and predatory open-access publishing. Digital age in semiotics and communication is the first specialized semiotic journal dedicated to the deep cultural transformations after the advent of the internet, and thus provides a platform for a long term collaboration with those fellow semioticians who intend to dedicate their research predominantly to such a topic. It is conceived as a platform for a kind of intellectual crowd sourcing for new semiotic ideas, adequate to new cultural realities, thus opening our discipline to the cultural agenda of the XXI century. The paper of Vuzharov “Personalization Algorithms – Limiting the Scope of Discovery? How algorithms force out serendipity” is about the major backstage processes behind the seductive services of Google and Facebook. The author keeps a strong ethical stance concerning the necessity for more awareness in this regard, and to make the point more clear uses the textual pragmatic model of Eco from The Limits of Interpretation (1992). The next two papers analyze new identity mechanisms emerged in digital culture. Andacht’s paper “The Imagined Community Revisited through a Mock-Nationalistic YouTube Web Series” is dedicated to a new and original form of video narrative, addressing the Uruguayan national identity in a totally different way compared to the nation formation described by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (1983). The main theoretical concept of the British scholar is semiotically revised with the help of some Peircean terms. The paper of Lankauskaitė and Liubinienė “A Shift from ‘Me’ to ‘We’ in Social Media” examines the impact of the Web 3.0. on the mentality of internet users. The shift from ‘me’ to ‘we’ is seen as a consequence of technological innovations which allow crowdsourcing, participatory culture, collective intelligence, etc. The thesis is illustrated with three case studies of an online TV, an offline social action, initiated in social media and an online project for artistic collaboration. The next five papers are dedicated to various aesthetic and interactive practices in digital culture. In his paper “Postcard from Istanbul: Digital Reconstruction of the City as Memory in Tasos Boulmetis’s Polítiki Kouzína / A Touch of Spice / Baharatin Tadi”, Dimitriadis explicates the narrative mechanisms for representing the past with the help of digital effects. Contrary to the mainstream use of the digital special FX, in this case a strong poetic effect is achieved in visualizing the space of memory. Cassone dedicates his paper “’It’s over 9000.’ Apeiron Narrative Configurations in Contemporary Mediascape” to an interesting videogame phenomenon, started as a pen and paper role-playing game in Japan prior to the digital age. The particular narrative device of individual growth of power in the fictional discourse, after the transfer of the plot as a videogame, is analyzed with the tools of generative semiotics and is spread as a meme and viral phenomenon. Another paper is about “Constructing the Corporate Instagram Discourse – a critical visual discourse approach”. There Poulsen takes a critical stance towards an important incoherence in the way Instagram represents its mission, and at the same time how the app is trying to regulate the use of the platform and its visual tools. In his text “Formalism and Digital Research of Literature,” Debnar examines another phenomenon typical of the digital age - the mass digitalization of literary texts and the challenges for the reader in front of huge archives available for everybody. The key notion of his text, borrowed from Moretti, is distant reading, and the author’s contribution is to demonstrate the validity of the formalist approach to that theory. In “Enchanted Object: Indian Sari, Negotiating the Online and the Offline Space”, Khanwalkar makes a sociosemiotic analysis of a garment with huge symbolic value – the Sari. The main object of the research is how online discourse on the Sari upgrades and transforms its significance, how local and global interact in the identity formation process. In the next section there are two papers on the digital age in corporate communication. In “Engaging Brand Communication in Facebook – a Typology of the Brand Page Users”, Kartunova identifies four types of Facebook users of corporate pages using the classical approach of Jean-Marie Floch. The study is supported by empirical data, collected among the target groups and puts the main emphasis on brand culture adoption and brand narrative engagement. Asimova has chosen a semiotic content analysis approach in order to investigate “Digital Culture of the Regulated Industries. Focus: Tobacco Sector”. The conclusions state that although the efficacy of the legal regulations in such industries, social media, blogs and forums open possibilities for marketers in innovative ways of promotion. Contrary to all other papers the last text in the journal, written by Yankova and entitled “The Effeteness of Social Media” holds a conservative stance and argues that similarities to past social relations are more relevant than the differences. The author shows how an abstract metaphysical vision of Peirce about the universe can be extended to the cultural reality of social media.

In the opening of his essay, “What Is an Author?,” Michel Foucault “formulates the theme with which [he] would like to begin” by quoting from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing: “’What does it matter who is speaking,’ someone said, ‘what does it matter who is speaking.’” In this essay, Foucault wants “to deal solely with the relationship between text and author and the manner in which the text points to this ‘figure’ that, at least in appearance, is outside it and antecedes it.” For Foucault, Beckett’s “indifference” points to “one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing,” ethical in that it is a kind of “immanent rule” that dominates writing as a practice. This rule, Foucault argues, is best illustrated by tracing “two of its major themes”: first, “that today’s writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression” and, second, that of “writing’s relationship with death.” “In writing,” Foucault claims, "the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears." Equally, "the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing" (342-43). As many people have explained, for Foucault, the death of the author is the birth of Discourse, or what in this essay he calls “discourses that are endowed with the ‘author-function’” (346). Specifically, Foucault explains – in that very French way of his – that in this essay he aims to “locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers” (345). And for the most part, this essay is cited for its contributions in locating that space brought into being with the author’s death. But what interested me in returning to “What Is an Author” was the amount of space that Foucault dedicates in the essay to explaining both the term “author” and the term “work” and his focus, specifically, on literary discourses. And he does so in ways that I think are productive for exploring the issue of literary studies in the age of web 2.0. In our most utopian moments in thinking about technology, we echo Beckett’s “indifference” to the question “What does it matter who is writing?” in our celebration of the leveling, transformative effects of Web 2.0. Those effects may be best reflected in David Gauntlett’s explanation of Media Studies 2.0. Ultimately the issue I want to explore in my book – the issue of literary studies in the age of web 2.0 – is also an issue of literacy versus the literary, and this difference may be one of the reasons why “New Media Studies” may have found a more hospitable home in Rhetoric Departments than in English. As Foucault goes on to explain: "The coming into being of the notion of “author” constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences. Even today, when we reconstruct the history of a concept, literary genre, or school of philosophy, such categories seem relatively weak, secondary, and superimposed scansions in comparison with the solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work" (What Is an Author 342). Literary Studies, I will argue, can’t exist without authors, even when – or maybe even especially when – those authors are discursive formations or cultural dominants that work with the text in constitutive ways. The cultural logic that operates in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark still works as a kind of author-function to keep blackness from appearing in an American literary text. And so here we can begin to see why the question, “What does it matter who is writing?” – the question, I would argue, of Web 2.0 -- begins to become a scary one for literary critics. Taste, judgment, and external authority are certainly three of the ways in which discourse functions to normalize and discipline, and as such they become contestable terms. And to be sure the essentialized ways in which these terms function to mark the genius and authority of the Romantic Poet historically come to mean lots of bad things. But what I want to suggest in my book is that one of the effects of literary studies in the age of web 2.0 is to point out how much of what we do – and how much of our own critical authority – is a matter of taste and judgment. And how the “Whiggery” of the Internet can reduce that critical judgment to the indifferent voice of Beckett’s question, “What difference does it make who’s writing?” Mark Poster argues that Beckett's question “poses the challenge of a planetary system of networked information machines and human assemblages;” and that “until we develop a critical theory that is able to raise this question in our media context we cannot expect to contribute significantly to the formation of a discourse of postnational democratic forms of power.” In my talk, I will argue that one way that literary studies can contribute to that discourse is for it to recuperate and redefine the terms in which we think the literary. Specifically, I propose that we rethink the terms Taste, Judgment, and the Imagination.

The article transposes the text of Roland Barthes' 'Death of the Author', (La Mort de L'auteur 1968), to the arena of happenings in cyberspace, and examines the implications from the point of view of author-reader-text, active in the electronic environment.