Core Post #2 (Sebastian)

    What struck me about several of the readings for this week is the way that they provide a preliminary theorization of how authorship might work in the context of new media. This is most obvious in Lev Manovich’s “New Media from Borges to HTML” and Jay David Bolter and David Grusin’s “Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation,” partially because both texts are invested in articulating the key terms and parameters of – at the time – the burgeoning field of new media studies. I find these articles fascinating because, although neither explicitly sets out to offer a comprehensive theory of new media authorship, both rely on a somewhat contradictory implied assumptions about the topic. To begin with, Manovich argues, 

[T]he logic of the art world and the logic of new media are exact opposites. The first is

based on the romantic idea of authorship which assumes a single author, the notion of a one-of-a-kind art object…. The second privileges the existence of potentially numerous copies; infinitely many different states of the same work; author-user symbiosis (the user can change the work through interactivity); the collective; collaborative authorship. (14)

Meanwhile, Bolter and Grusin posit that the drive towards “immediacy” – which can be achieved through “transparency” – has been an ongoing objective for most Western artistic mediums, including new media. Each medium seeks to immerse the spectator/user in an illusion of reality that effaces the medium itself. Bolter and Grusin observe, 

The irony is that it was hard work to make the surface disappear in this fashion, and in fact the artist’s success at effacing his process, and thereby himself, became for trained viewers a mark of his skill and therefore his presence. (25)

In short, Manovich suggests that new media authorship is collective and collaborative, while Bolter and Grusin contend that the new media ideal of immediacy is best achieved through a singular, talented auteur.

    Not only are these readings structured around a binary – individual vs. collective authorship – but they also rhetorically mobilize another set of binaries: Man/Nature and Nature/Technology. As Bolter and Grusin explain, immediacy is often framed as an ideal in Western art because it is understood to be more “natural.” Specifically addressing new media, they write, “[T]he user will move through the space interacting with the objects ‘naturally’ as she does in the physical world” (23). This insinuates that there is indeed a split between Nature and Technology that Technology should seek to overcome. But, at the same time, the Man/Nature binary that is so common in Western philosophy also persists in discussions about media and technology. According to Bolter and Grusin, photography was initially thought to be more “natural” than other mediums because the images it produces lack the obvious artistic intervention of Man (26). Thus, one might ask: Is Man closer to Nature than Technology and therefore necessary to bridge the divide between the latter two, or is Technology better at simulating Nature when it lacks Man’s intervention?

    To be frank, I am much less interested in answering this question than I am in the way that the question illustrates a set of Western colonialist assumptions that inform Manovich’s and Bolter and Grusin’s efforts to lay the foundations for new media studies as an emerging field. For instance, not only is the Man/Nature binary distinctly gendered, but it is also rooted in Western epistemologies that have been propagated through colonialism. In “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (Métis) note that Indigenous lifeways, by contrast, call on us to “acknowledge our embedded and embodied relations with our other-than-human kin and the land itself” (776). With that in mind, I cannot help but wonder if we might find more generative models for new media authorship by looking beyond the Western theoretical binaries that continuously reinscribe themselves in this discourse. 

    As just one possible example of this, I turn to some of the scholarship surrounding stories passed down through Tlingit oral tradition. In Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives, Nora Marks Dauenhauer (Tlingit) and Richard Dauenhauer observe that these stories are often generated collaboratively and adapted over time to meet the needs of the story tellers and the story listeners. For any number of reasons, “different tradition bearers focus on different things” when telling ostensibly the same story (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 11). In a sense, this prefigures the collective model of authorship described by Manovich wherein an “author-user symbiosis” allows the user to “change the work through interactivity” (14). Manovich seems to further imply that collective new media authorship will lead to a loosening of authorial ownership and control. After all, he insists that new media allows “for the existence of potentially numerous copies; infinitely many different states of the same work” (14). Scholars like Rosita Kaaháni Worl (Tlingit) highlight some of the ethical considerations and limitations of Manovich’s assertion. She writes, “The traditional legal system of the Tlingit… is based on ideologies and practices that recognize communal ownership of both tangible and intangible or intellectual property” (Worl i). Tlingit ownership is thus strengthened by, for instance, the continual retelling of stories (i.e., “the existence of potentially numerous copies”). The characteristics of new media as described by Manovich may at times allow people to bypass forms of gatekeeping produced by previous notions of authorship (ex. the ability to pirate copyrighted material owned by corporations). But they could also create problems for certain communally authored works – like those described by Worl – thereby extending the extractive project of colonialism. In short, just as the Dauenhauers’ work points to alternate ways of theorizing the author-user relationship as it pertains to new media, Worl’s work illustrates the complexity of the collective new media authorship heralded by the likes of Manovich. 

    I turn to the writings of Worl and the Dauenhauers not because they are definitive or absolute; they offer but one of many non-Western ways to theorize authorship. Rather, I turn to them precisely because they are a valuable reminder that there are many ways to conceptualize these issues outside of the Western binaries and limitations that Manovich, Bolter, and Grusin reproduce in their work. In “The Virtual Barrio @ The Other Frontier,” Guillermo Gómez-Peña calls for young activists and artists to find innovative and political ways to use new technologies. He argues that this means “the larger virtual community must get used to a new cultural presence – the cyber immigrant/mojado; sensibility; and many new languages spoken in the net” (9-10). Likewise, if scholars are to theorize these innovative and political manifestations of new media, it seems reasonable to suggest that their understanding of new media authorship must derive from epistemologies that are – if not new then at least – decidedly more wide-ranging.

 

Additional Citations

Dauenhauer, Nora Marks, and Richard Dauenhauer, editors. Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors: Tlingit

Oral Narratives. University of Washington Press and Sealaska Heritage Foundation, 1987.

Davis, Heather, and Zoe Todd. “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the

Anthropocene.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, vol. 16, no. 4, 2017, pp. 761-780.

Worl, Rosita Faith. “Tlingit At.oow: Tangible and Intangible Property.” 1998. Harvard

University, PhD dissertation.