Reading (con)text metatextually

James Gee describes a classroom activity wherein he has students write down the tools they associate with work. When the students are finished, they examine what the tools say about their conceptions of work and how this speaks to social class and personal history. I couldn’t help but think of Gee’s exercise when reading about the type of work modern authors do in relation to the work of the first printers.

Let me take a step back from the previous paragraph for a second and note how intrinsically linked our notion of language is to life. (And life/death, it seems, is really what text is all about [Ong, 81].) I use the word describes to relate an activity. In a more literal (hence less linguistically abstract) reading of the word, we see a (re)mediation of scribe—a turning from action to text and text-into-action. But later, I use the words say and speaks to convey what students wrote and were thinking (and here we should also note the tense changes). And even now, in this paragraph I note the appropriations of these words. Let us just agree that any puns involving the interplay between the constructed word and its abstract meaning are, at once, entirely accidental now, but intentional at one point[1] in time.

The tools of the trade for the first printers[2] dictated[3] their roles in the work of reproducing[4] texts. As Eisenstein writes, “Even before a given reference work had come off the press, fruitful encounters between typefounders, correctors, translators... and others engaged in editorial work had already occurred” (49). These sorts of meetings and interactions, Eisenstein comes to term as “combinatory activity” (49). Indeed, the combined knowledge as well as the power dynamics created by putting these forces in conversation[5], leads[6] to even the singularly-authored[7] text as a collaborative piece.[8]

            Because the human element is always at play in interpretation, copying, and producing, the language within a text is never truly dead as Plato might have feared. The written word continues to live because it is reproduced/is a product of a system based in materiality. The material might shift though. And I mean shift in the most textual of senses (i.e. pressing the “shift” key). Plato describes transcending as meaning is made into Meaning. Perhaps as the word is recopied and its Meaning is lost, but we come to understand it in its new heteroglossic context as Word with meaning(s)—its context enveloped around it. This is why transcendence is unachievable—because we are being torn (like a sheet of paper) between two realities: one based in materiality, the other based in time.

            Eisenstein traces the notion of textual corruption to its liveliness—the perishability of its material components and the flexible contexts of interpretation and reproduction (87). The following sentence is my own spin on Eisenstein’s idea as I act as scribe to reproduce the idea she stole and claim it as my own Words. As paper dies, the text has to live. Once text becomes cemented (like the initials I carved into the sidewalk where I grew up), it is as dead as my childhood. Again, we see/read/experience/interpret/whatever that at once we are constrained by the material, yet the material pushes us to move beyond it. The point[9] is that we can look[10] behind[11] the text to more accurately read what the (con)text is saying.

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[1] A point being, of course, one twelfth of a pica. The text here in Word is twelve point. If you multiply, you can get the product in picas (or see—by which I mean read—footnote 4). I have no idea if Blogger will convert the text into a different type and make it a product of their own design. I should also note that a point, mathematically speaking is plotted out as a dot (.), the same mark used to end a sentence.

[2] By printers, I mean, the people, not the machines. Though, as I note in a posthumanist move, there isn’t much difference between the two in footnote 3. More interestingly is the use of the brand name Xerox to identify paper photocopies from scanned copies. 

[3] And here/hear I have a word that describes the didactic action that we commonly associate with power—the author speaking her manuscript to a lowly assistant who performs the function of writing it down (as a scribe). Yet, the players in my example are mechanical and people-as-defined-by-their-machines. Maybe these are the conversations I describe—ha!—in footnote number 5. (And I have to wonder as I move this text from Word to Blogger if "footnote" is really the correct term or if I need to change it as I act as the printer/poster [poster still being a term derives from print culture] [see footnote 2]).

[4] Because the product (a mathematical term describing—that word again!—the final number arrived at in a multiplication equation) is really what happens when we combine and multiply work forces.

[5] Conversation is a common trope in academia when two texts by long-dead authors are juxtaposed by a living party. These conversations are said to produce insight. 

[6] And the leading required between single-spaced lines like this is typically 13 points.

[7] That is, a text where a single person is the authority. 

[8] And now I’ve juxtaposed “text” (typically seen as a whole) with “piece” which insinuates that it is merely a part of something bigger. I hope that putting these two words in conversation produces some insight. 

[9] In the non-pica sense.

[10] By which I mean “read into” as opposed to reading over or looking up. Maybe a vision that looks deeply--like "insight!"--would best describe what I am hoping to say here.

[11] And by “looking behind the text” to discover meaning, I am unintentionally referring to looking in the back of the book at the meaningful indexes of glossaries and appendices. Or it could mean a footnote. I guess it depends on the sort of reading material you’re working with.