Difference between revisions of "Textual Closure (Formal)"

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In the “Phaedrus” dialogue, Plato debates the nature of the printed word in relation to oratory. Plato holds that writing can be useful as an aid to memory, but not as a replacement for it.  He believes the presence of the written word stymies education, leading men to believe they know truths documented therein, when education such that one can reproduce the content is knowledge’s true measure.
 
In the “Phaedrus” dialogue, Plato debates the nature of the printed word in relation to oratory. Plato holds that writing can be useful as an aid to memory, but not as a replacement for it.  He believes the presence of the written word stymies education, leading men to believe they know truths documented therein, when education such that one can reproduce the content is knowledge’s true measure.
  
<pre>"[I]f a man believes … that in reality such compositions are, at the best, a means of reminding those who know the truth, that lucidity and completeness and serious importance belong only to those lessons … that are expounded and set forth for the sake of instruction, and are veritably written in the soul of the listener, and that such discourses are ought to be accounted a man's own legitimate children … this … I would venture to affirm" (278a-b)</pre>
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[I]f a man believes … that in reality such compositions are, at the best, a means of reminding those who know the truth, that lucidity and completeness and serious importance belong only to those lessons … that are expounded and set forth for the sake of instruction, and are veritably written in the soul of the listener, and that such discourses are ought to be accounted a man's own legitimate children … this … I would venture to affirm (278a-b)</div></blockquote>
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While the Romantic ideal of a text as a work of aesthetic genius inspired by nature is often considered Platonic, curiously Plato also holds that no static written work can contain “important truth of permanent validity.”  Plato’s view appears to be that truth-promoting practices must be learned, such that one can employ these practices to debate about the nature of truth in a dialectical fashion, without believing that truth can be achieved, in a fixed textual state.
 
While the Romantic ideal of a text as a work of aesthetic genius inspired by nature is often considered Platonic, curiously Plato also holds that no static written work can contain “important truth of permanent validity.”  Plato’s view appears to be that truth-promoting practices must be learned, such that one can employ these practices to debate about the nature of truth in a dialectical fashion, without believing that truth can be achieved, in a fixed textual state.

Revision as of 07:55, 5 May 2010

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The semiotic marker of textual closure present in a folio of Shakespeare's works from the early 1600s.

Textual closure, in a formal sense, is the property primarily exhibited by the printed material text during much of the modern historical moment by virtue of its formal construction as a complete and unified conceptual whole. It may be most commonly associated now with the frequently convergent notion of discursive closure, as reflected in the Romantic Era concept of the modern literary novel as a *narrative* whole proceeding from a beginning and end, however formal closure is a conceptually distinct principle. A narrative text which is not discursively closed, such as a serial text or a narrative with an open ending, is still formally closed when the end of the printed text is reached. A formally closed text is any distinct, data-bearing document, typically printed, delimited by a paratextual frame, which cannot be modified on the discursive level of its original inscription.


The Written Word Before The Codex

The text is formally closed insofar as its informational content exhibits a designed whole of relational units, wherein any fundamental modification would be interpreted as a violation, typically of the textual author's final intentions. The 500 years since the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press has seen the solidification of this view, in the Romantic Era in Europe, as inherently tied to the medium of the printed book. Yet perhaps surprisingly, it is both the case that this view is likely to be historically contingent, and that similar views about the written word more generally pre-dated the printing press, and even the Roman codex.

In the “Phaedrus” dialogue, Plato debates the nature of the printed word in relation to oratory. Plato holds that writing can be useful as an aid to memory, but not as a replacement for it. He believes the presence of the written word stymies education, leading men to believe they know truths documented therein, when education such that one can reproduce the content is knowledge’s true measure.


[I]f a man believes … that in reality such compositions are, at the best, a means of reminding those who know the truth, that lucidity and completeness and serious importance belong only to those lessons … that are expounded and set forth for the sake of instruction, and are veritably written in the soul of the listener, and that such discourses are ought to be accounted a man's own legitimate children … this … I would venture to affirm (278a-b)</div></blockquote>


While the Romantic ideal of a text as a work of aesthetic genius inspired by nature is often considered Platonic, curiously Plato also holds that no static written work can contain “important truth of permanent validity.” Plato’s view appears to be that truth-promoting practices must be learned, such that one can employ these practices to debate about the nature of truth in a dialectical fashion, without believing that truth can be achieved, in a fixed textual state.



530: Roman Legal Administration

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Representation of Justinian I's "Corpus Juris Civilis" ("Body of Civil Law")

Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology

1 Textual genre: Legal codex - Distinguish from scroll

2 Representative: Roman Emperor Justinian I

3 Figure: Father, murderer of 'mother literature,' of pre-codified thought

4 Emergent whole: writ and force of law

5 Medium and function: the codex. Compilation, indexical (digital); as compared with the radically serial (analog) scroll

6 Literacy: functional protocol as social norm

7 Closure (Opening?): Implicit truth of codex-codified protocol

8 Agency structure: Legal administrators hold agency through codified, unified law; subjects are compelled to conform

9 Dynamic:



1800: the German Bildungsroman

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Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship"

Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900

1 Textual genre: Bildungsroman novel - distinguish from law, which is literal?

2 Representative: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

3 Figure: erotic, primal mother - and indulgent child

4 Emergent whole: unity of fiction novel

5 Medium and function: the bildungsroman novel, the scientific treatise. The (invisibly technological) serial aesthetic, or scientific whole. As compared with 'random' aspects of compilation codex.

6 Literacy: Alphebetization through education

7 Closure / Opening: Unity of subjective experience realized in imagination

8 Agency structure: Authors hold agency through 'works'; yet subjects are enabled to 'hallucinate' these in imagination in any way, and to derive pleasure from this experience

9 Dynamic:



2000: Computational Sociality

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Editing History of Wikipedia's "Evolution" article

N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts

1 Textual genre: Clustering, dynamic digital texts

2 Representative: Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia

3 Figure: "Universal motherboard ... of us all" (Hayles)

4 Emergent whole?: Materiality of digital text - a heterogenous clustering unity?

5 Medium and function: the digital text. A dynamic, inherently coded whole. As compared with the uncanny fixity of the printed word.

6 Literacy: 'Alphebetization' Youth co-option of common consumer technology

7 Opening (Closure?): Computation as fluid, but with infinite memory

8 Agency structure: Author loses control over works; subjects gain ability to manipulate texts technically

9 Dynamic:



References

Barthes, Roland, [1971]. “From Work to Text,” from Hale, Dorothy (ed) The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900-2000. Wiley-Blackwell. Print.

Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. 1997. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine (2005) "My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts." The University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Print.

Hesse, Carla (1996), "Books in Time," pp. 21-36. From Nunberg, Geoffrey (ed) The Future of the Book. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1996. Print.

Kittler, Friedrich. (1990) Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Stanford University Press: Stanford. Print.

Miah, Andy, (2003). “(e)Text: Error… 404 Not Found! Or The Disappearance of History,” Culture Machine, Vol. 5. Text available at: http://www.culturemachine.net.

Thompson, John B (1981). “Editor’s Introduction,” pp. 1-26. From Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Print.

Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford University Press: Stanford. 2008. Print.