Play’s Republic

So while at the Media in Transition conference last weekend, the Heraclitean/Platonic dichotomy Garrison set out at the beginning of class kept jumping out at me. Someone in the very first plenary session, Tom Pettitt, described something which fits perfectly, and which Garrison has somewhat alluded to in a recent post.

One of the panelists described an interesting concept he termed the “Gutenberg Parenthesis.” This was a divide which occurred when cultures changed from a primarily oral or hand-copied tradition to one of reliable, consistent mechanical reproduction. Once this happened, a privileged, reified place was given to the concept of the complete, original text, “as the author intended,” rather than an interpreted work. Prior to this transition, works evolved and changed over time, and the performative aspect was more important than the accuracy.

What is significant about this parenthesis, and one of the reasons why Prof. Pettitt talked about this concept at a conference on Creativity, Collaboration, and Ownership in the Digital Age, is that he speculates that we may be leaving this parenthetical period. He sees the digital era as having much in common with the pre-gutenberg era. To copy off his handout from the session:

Pre-parenthetical Gutenberg Parenthesis Post-Parenthetical
re-creative original sampling
collective individual remixing
con-textual autonomous borrowing
unstable stable reshaping
traditional canonical appropriating
Performance Composition recontextualizing

This seems to be accurate to me. Digital media, with it’s ease of copying, modifying, and transmission, certainly moves away from the primacy of the original work. That is the source of all the copyright problems that are disrupting media industries today. Video, audio, graphics, all are getting reappropriated, changed, and redistributed across digital media.

This follows along with the heraclitean ideas of playing and changing, rather than the platonic idealism. Media technology seems to be moving into an era where “playful” creation and interaction is facilitated by the nature of the technology, just as platonic idealism was facilitated by past technologies. However, at the last panel, someone pointed out that we should not denigrate this past technological parenthetical. Great works have been produced. The danger is to look at the post-parenthetical period as progress over or beyond the parenthesis. The new technologies should not be simply seen as better than the older ones, but as a new approach, appropriate for some uses, detrimental for others. Pettitt points out that different media forms entered into, and left, the parenthesis at different times. Poetry entered at an early time he says, while theater’s emphasis on performance had it enter later. It would be wrong to reify the new forms of media, but better to use them, and understand those uses to best apply them to cultural forms and generate the best results.